


Meeting Leo

by heymacareyna



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: All Leo's machines love Reyna, Aurum and argentum love Leo, Brought over from ff.net, Evil!Octavian, F/M, Leo drinks coffee, Reyna constantly consumes hot chocolate and jelly beans, Some Swearing, calypso is not relevant to leo's love life, some PDA, some violence, written before HOH
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-02
Updated: 2013-08-09
Packaged: 2018-03-04 07:40:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 39,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3002531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heymacareyna/pseuds/heymacareyna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During a two-week end-of-war celebration, Reyna finds that she thinks differently about Leo every time they meet. Leyna. Rated T for minor swearing, violence, and PDA. Written before HoH.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Act One: Camp Half-Blood

The first time Reyna met Leo, she didn't even technically meet him; she met his warship shooting at her home. That was when she made up her mind not to like him, whether or not he was possessed by ghosts.

However, she still didn't actually meet him until after Gaea had been defeated and the Greek and Roman demigods came together for a celebration, hopefully one untainted by trivialities like bombings and murder. Because this time, if one came, so would the other. Reyna didn't take kindly to Greeks who shot at her camp and then didn't even have the decency to come and take the consequences.

The celebration was to last two weeks, with the first week at Camp Half-Blood and the second at Camp Jupiter. Reyna almost chose not to go, but someone needed to set a good example for her Romans. So she found herself on board a Greek warship—the same warship that had fired on New Rome a few months ago, in fact, which burned her to  _no_  end—sailing over the continental United States, heading for a bunch of Greeks on Long Island. Oh, goody. She surreptitiously slipped a handful of jelly beans into her mouth.

She did have a small windfall, though. The camp-bomber wasn't driving the ship this time. He ( _Leo Valdez_ , Annabeth had said his name was, but Reyna didn't feel that was malicious enough) had apparently taken an engine explosion to the everything, so some other Vulcan—no, Hephaestus—kids were covering for him as best they could. Annabeth swore up and down that camp-bomber would be better by the time they got there, that Reyna could meet him, that she was sure they wouldn't have any problems.

"Of course," the blonde had added, "it might help if you stopped calling him 'camp-bomber.'"

So Reyna had started verbally referring to him as "Valdez," but in her head he was still and would always be "camp-bomber."

Within forty-eight hours the Argo II started to descend, and Reyna had never been so happy to see land. As soon as they were within landing distance of the strawberry fields, Reyna began to assemble her legion, getting them together and into something like formation. She had a firm grip on the side when the ship banged onto the grass, but it was the best awful landing of her life. This trip had revealed she wasn't much for sky travel outside of Pegasus riding. Or perhaps she just didn't like being a passenger instead of the driver.

Reyna led her Romans off the ship just as an elfin Latino guy ran up to meet them—or maybe not them. She watched as he threw himself at the side of the ship, talking a mile a minute to the Hephaestus pilots (and, it seemed, the dragon masthead). She sighed, shook her head, and was prepared to write it off as a Greek Thing. But then Annabeth and Percy came out to meet them too, and Percy gestured to the talkative guy and said, "Don't mind Leo, he just missed Festus."

Then Reyna, ever controlled, broke rank to stride stone-faced up to him. Annabeth called out something, but she didn't hear it. She was too busy shoving Valdez, camp-bomber, out of his conversation. He looked straight at her (he was short for a guy, but still a smidge taller than she, which made her dislike him more), his hair looking like it hadn't been brushed in a week. And he must not have realized what was happening, because he tried to smooth his curls like that would save him.

"Hey, lovely," he said with a grin.

Somehow Reyna's knife appeared under Valdez's chin. She called him a few unflattering names in Latin and Spanish.

"Please don't break him, Reyna," Percy said, coming up behind her. "We like him. Plus he's the best repair boy we have."

Annabeth muttered to him, "I  _told_  you not to introduce them like that."

Reyna glowered at the camp-bomber for a moment, but finally she stowed her knife, and the entire group of Greeks and Romans let out a relieved sigh. She would talk to her legionnaires about that later. Head held high, she strode back to her Romans.

"Is she insane?" Leo asked Annabeth in awe, rubbing his chin. He didn't seem as, say, terrified for his life as Reyna would have liked, but she could always scare him into it later.

"Welcome to Camp Half-Blood," Percy said, smiling though his tone was uncertain.

"Thank you for hosting the Twelfth Legion Fulminata," Reyna said neutrally. They hadn't brought the golden eagle, but she was beginning to wish they had. Being out of her armor and far from home, she wished for an emblem of her strength. She was out of her element.

_No, you're not_ , she said to herself suddenly, firmly.  _You're praetor and you have to be the most in your element of all the legion_. So she straightened her back and lifted her chin and spread her feet. Sure, she still didn't feel quite at ease, but she looked confident, and she did feel a little better.

"Please show us your camp," she said.

* * *

Reyna liked Annabeth, but not very much right now. The daughter of Athena had made an executive decision to keep Leo around, as if she enjoyed watching the two of them interact.  _Interact_ , of course, here meant that Leo jittered and blabbered inanely and Reyna tried to look pleasantly in control while also plotting his death.

It was an interesting tour.

She was torn about the camp itself. It was certainly . . . nice. It was no New Rome, to be sure. She did like the looks of the arena and the climbing wall, and the pegasus stables might be nice while she was there. It just all seemed . . . less organized than her home. Was that the point of bringing the two camps together? To learn to appreciate the other? She wasn't sure she wouldn't rather just have a big battle and be done with it.

The demigods seemed like reasonably good people. Chiron was capable of handling them. Dionysus (they called him  _Mr. D_ , which seemed incredibly disrespectful, yet the god preferred it for some reason) didn't contribute much that Reyna saw, but having a god on hand might be useful. Jason and Piper were gone, and Percy wouldn't define why, but Reyna didn't complain. Honestly, she didn't feel like spending much time around the two. Other than that, all was fine. One week wasn't that long, right?

Oh, gods. She was going to die.

* * *

Dinner was quite an event, given the strange way Camp Half-Blood arranged seating. As a daughter of Bellona, who had no Greek counterpart, Reyna presented a problem, but Chiron eventually decided she could sit with Ares or Athena or at the big table with him and Mr. D. As much fun as those options sounded, she took one look at the Ares table and decided to sit with the children of Athena. It might help override some of her Minerva-Athena prejudice. Probably not, but she was willing to try.

She swept into the seat beside Annabeth, looking over the others coolly. A few nodded and muttered, "Praetor," but the rest either kept their eyes to their plates or went back to their (now slightly hushed) conversations. Annabeth forced an encouraging smile, but Reyna shrugged it off. She ruled mostly by fear at home; not having friends was normal.

"So how are things at Camp Jupiter?" Annabeth asked, obviously trying to set an example for the others.

"Well enough," Reyna said shortly. "It didn't take more than a few days to rebuild what was damaged in the war."

"Good." The blonde floundered for a topic.

"You know, I'm not really hungry," Reyna said, and it was true. She'd had almost an entire bag of jelly beans over the course of the day, plus a cup and a half of hot chocolate.

"Oh," Annabeth said. "Well, you don't have to stay if you don't want to."

"All right." Reyna considered adding  _see you around_  but decided against it; obviously they would run into each other again. So she simply stood, scraped her uneaten mound of mashed potatoes into the fire (she didn't know who to address it to, but hey), and strode out of the place like she had somewhere to be. She didn't, but there was no reason to bring up technicalities.

The camp was quiet once she got out of the dining pavilion; everyone was busy eating as much as they could before the official end-of-war celebrations began tomorrow. Reyna walked down the main path, committing the layout of camp to memory as best she could, and eventually she sat down behind a metal shed on the far side of the strawberry fields. It was a quiet, solitary place, out of the way of anyone leaving dinner, and it kind of reminded her of the Garden of Bacchus at home.

Ugh. She missed home already, not that anyone would ever hear her say it. Coming to Camp Half-Blood, while probably a good move in the long run, right now just left her feeling out of place. The Greek system had no use for praetors, and Reyna had nothing else to do otherwise. She was left to cling to the front of the legion and pretend she was useful. She leaned back onto the shed and banged the back of her head on the metal. It didn't help.

Actually, it hurt, in more ways than one. The noise attracted someone's attention—a guy from the other side called out, "Hey, is someone there?"

Suppressing a groan, Reyna pushed herself to her feet and stepped around the shed just in time to come nose-to-nose with an orange-shirted camper. Valdez. Her eyes narrowed, but he held up his hands and backed away before she could pull out her knife.

"Whoa there, pretty lady," he said hastily. "No need for violence. I'm not here to talk to you, sad to say."

Clenching her hands into fists, she didn't attempt to slit his throat, which she felt was a noble improvement on her part. "Why aren't you at dinner?" she asked coldly.

"Not hungry," he said like it should have been obvious. "Not that they're likely to notice whether I'm there or not."

She doubted that. Surely no one else caused the same level of chaos as he did.

"But anyway," he continued, a forced pleasantness to his tone, "I'm just, you know, hanging out over here on this side of the shed. You can sit on that side of the shed, and that way neither of us has to leave, and you don't even have to look at me."

Not having to look at him did sound nice. She looked him over, checking for any plots or tricks or dangerous weapons, but he seemed to mean it. Against her will, she moved back between the strawberry fields and the metal wall, and the thick grass rustled as they both sat back down. She stared out into the fields, her mind whirring though her lips remained clamped together. She was certainly not going to instigate conversation with this person.

Actually, now that she thought about it, Valdez was remaining pretty quiet himself. She had expected loud, obnoxious ADHD antics, or at the least, pathetically doomed attempts to flirt. But no, he didn't address her at all, and she couldn't hear anything from his side of the shed except the occasional heavy breath.

This was when Reyna's mouth went against all her better judgment: she found herself leaning toward the corner of the wall and calling around it, "Are you usually this accommodating?"

Valdez laughed a little; it sounded tinny through the shed. "No," he called back. "Normally I try my best to be as unaccommodating as possible. It's part of my ability to simultaneously charm and annoy the  _infierno_  out of people."

"That I believe. The annoying part, anyway."

She had been serious, but he laughed again, and she could just picture that huge grin splitting his face. "I told Jason once, don't insult my ability to annoy. I'm glad you can appreciate it."

"I don't think 'appreciate' is the word I would use," she said.

"I know." He was quiet again, and Reyna began to wonder if she ought to say something else, but then he said, "I don't think anyone would use the word 'appreciate,' actually."

He didn't sound excited, but she had to agree, "Probably not."

Leo banged something against the metal shed—maybe his shoe, or his head, she couldn't tell. "You want to know why I'm actually out here?" he asked, sounding tired. She didn't think he was smiling anymore.

"Why?" Reyna asked. She meant to come off coolly polite, but actual concern somehow got in there too.

"For the next two weeks we're going to celebrate a war that almost killed us all, me included." She knew this, obviously. He continued, "But if I'm not the most enthusiastically insane person there, it will be all, What's  _wrong_ , Leo? Aren't you  _happy_ , Leo? Here, do you want to fix my  _iPod_ , Leo? Because  _Dios_   _forbid_  I ever be upset about anything." Something hit the other side of the shed again.

Reyna was surprised by the turn in the conversation. "Have you mentioned this to any of your friends? The rest of the Seven, or the Vul—Hephaestus cabin?"

Leo snorted. "The other six are so happily paired off, Gaea could start to wake again and they probably wouldn't even notice. And the other Hephaestus campers . . . I don't know. I've never really fit with them. They all think I'm a scary freak."

Reyna opened her mouth, but he hurried to say, " _Not_  because of the eidolon. Because—" Suddenly he cut himself off, like he'd reconsidered what he was about to say. "Never mind."

She didn't ask. She probably didn't want to know. Instead she rolled her jeans up to her knees, pulled off her socks and tennis shoes, and dug her toes into the cool dirt, thinking. Back to the topic at hand: "You could just not show up at the celebration," she said, even though she knew it was a long shot.

"That's not an option, and you know it," Leo called her out. "They'll want to have me there with the Seven."

"I don't know, I was considering not going," Reyna offered.

"Praetor of New Rome? Yeah, no chance. They'll want you there too." He paused. "Why don't  _you_  want to go? Too undignified?"

Too undignified. She scrunched up her toes in the dirt and actually almost smiled. "Not quite. I'm just aware that I don't have much of a place there."

Leo was quiet. She guessed that he wasn't sure whether to agree or lie.

"It's not a problem," she lied. "I'm perfectly used to it. I just usually have duties as a praetor that make it inconspicuous."

Leo mumbled something to himself; Reyna couldn't quite make it out, but she did hear "a praetor and a repair boy" and "same problem." And it occurred to her then, quite as a surprise, that Leo's happy-go-lucky, flirtatious, obnoxious presence as a jokester might be as much of a mask as her own stoic, courageous presence as praetor. Another false public face. Did his friends even realize it?

Reyna realized that, although this was the third time she'd "met" Leo Valdez, it was only the first time she'd truly  _met_  him.

"If you want somewhere out of the way to hang out," Leo offered, sounding both eager and hesitant, "you can come watch me work in Bunker Nine. Nobody else really goes there."

She leaned back against the shed, looking up at the sinking sun. "I might," she said, and she meant it.


	2. Act Two: Camp Half-Blood

The next morning, Reyna went for her normal run from seven to eight (though she missed having Aurum and Argentum at her side), and after she showered, she picked up a cup of hot chocolate, fully marshmallowed, from the Big House. Chiron was now her favorite hero-training centaur ever.

As she walked down to the arena, though, she began to regret getting up so "early." It was normal according to her daily regiment at Camp Jupiter, but she wasn't at Camp Jupiter now. She was at Camp Half-Blood, where demigods slept in until nine and then wandered around aimlessly all day. Well, okay, maybe not  _all_  day, but compared to New Rome, there was hardly any discipline to the daily schedule.

She did appreciate the good weather, at least. She and her Romans dealt with whatever weather came to them in order to build up discipline, in-storm stamina, whatever, but it made life easier to walk on dry paths and feel the sun on your skin.

Reyna stopped by the pegasus stables and took a trial flight to see if Greek pegasi were any different from the Roman kind, but it reminded her painfully of Scipio and she left. She could have gone back to the Athena cabin, where she was staying, but somehow it just didn't appeal to her. Too many children of the Greek wisdom/war/crafts goddess in one building. She considered stopping by the Bunker Nine Leo had mentioned, but she didn't know where it was, and besides, running to it first thing in the morning was way too Alone And Needy for her.

" _Reina_ ," someone said from behind her, a sleepy but vaguely familiar voice. As she turned, she saw Leo standing in the middle of the path, nursing what smelled like a coffee. It took her a second, but she realized from the lilt of his tongue he'd said the Spanish word for "queen" rather than her name.

"Hello," she said neutrally. She held her half-drunk cup of hot chocolate behind her back, hoping he wouldn't comment on their common morning rituals.

He blinked rapidly as he drank from his cup, like the mere ingestion was enough to get his mental gears whirring again. "Looks like you're having a blast on your vacation, Rey-Rey."

"Just use my name, repair boy," she sighed. She didn't like to lose at anything, but if this turned into a ridiculous nicknames contest, he would probably win; she didn't have much experience in that arena.

"Are you on your way to come visit me?" he asked, waggling his eyebrows suggestively.

"Does it look like I am?"

"Not particularly, but you know what they say about appearances."

"I actually don't know what they say about appearances," she said. "I  _do_  know what they say about people who assume."

He laughed, though she hadn't been trying to make a joke. "Okay, I'll accept that," he said, taking another swig of coffee. "Want to come anyway? I'm headed that way."

"I was going to visit the pegasus stables," she said, adding a mental  _at some point in the future again_  so it wasn't a lie.

"Okie-doke," he said, pleasantly enough, and if she hadn't talked to him last night she probably wouldn't have noticed the slight disappointment hidden behind it. A mask, indeed. "So, celebration starts today. Feeling more excited?"

"No."

"Me either. Hence going to work."

She sucked the inside of her cheek and looked out into the wide, boring lawn. "You never did tell me where the bunker thing was," she pointed out. "I couldn't get there if I wanted to."

It was a conditional statement, meant to ward off any suspicions about her interests, but he perked up. "Then come along," he said, waving with his coffee cup for her to follow him. "You can walk with me, and then you can either stay or come back to these thrilling morning plans, but either way you'll know where it is."

Rolling her shoulders in a shrug (it was strange how much freedom of movement she had when she didn't wear armor), she reluctantly stood, clasping her own cup with both hands and sipping from it. Leo walked a half-step ahead of her, since he knew the way and she didn't, but he never left her behind. They didn't talk much, but between both their hot beverages, he asked if she'd slept well, and she said yes, thank you, and that was about the end of it.

Through the trees and shrubbery and occasional wild monster, they came to what looked like nothing, but Leo stopped and Reyna stood back to wait. He glanced back at her, looking strangely nervous, and his hand hovered in the air before he reached into his tool belt. He pulled out Altoids (for coffee breath?) before he got what he wanted: he wielded a small blowtorch and aimed it at the side of a hill. Reyna was suspicious, but when the blast of fire hit the hillside, an inscribed "Eta" lit up, and a secret door slid away. Leo headed in, Reyna at his heels.

Only years of practice let her keep her composure. She was no child of Vulcan, but the bunker was amazing. Easily the size of an airplane hangar, stuffed to the brim with plans and half-finished projects. As far as Reyna knew (and Reyna knew a lot), Camp Jupiter had nothing close to this. Leo stuck the blowtorch back into his belt and headed for one of the tables covered in blueprints and layouts.

"You can stay or go, whatever," he said, glancing over his shoulder and trying to pretend he didn't care which she chose. But her eyes were still wide, trying to take it all in, and she dragged a chair from the table and sat in it backward, just to change things up.

"Okay," she said, and he grinned warmly at her, even as he rolled up a paper and took it to a broken automaton.

She had been watching him work for a while, maybe half an hour, when she noticed there was a small mahogany-and-bronze table peeking out at her from behind the bigger table. "Was that there before?" she muttered to herself. She jumped when it hopped toward her.

"Buford," Leo called.

The table hesitated but eventually walked over to the mechanic.

"You named your table?" she called to him.

Leo looked up, and in the moment of distracted attention, the table hustled back over to Reyna, bouncing on its three legs and piping a little steam out the vents on its side. Leo set down the wrench he'd been holding and came over to study it.

"He's never done that before," he said, half to himself, but when he reached out to tinker with it, it skittered to Reyna's other side.

"Do all your tables walk?" Reyna asked as Leo chased the little table around her.

"Just Buford," he panted. "He's not usually this ornery, though.  _Buford!_ " The table froze, and he grabbed it. Reyna raised an eyebrow.

"Maybe he just likes me," she suggested. She wasn't fully serious, but the table (that was named Buford?) tried to wriggle towards her as though it agreed.

Leo contemplated this, his brow creasing. He glanced at her and the table and her again, his swarthy, oil-smeared cheeks turning just a little pink. "Probably a glitch," he said, and eventually he just got what he needed from Buford and went back to his work, leaving the table to lean up against Reyna like it wanted to snuggle.

* * *

Lunchtime came and went, and only mild stomach pangs told Reyna it was getting to be the afternoon. She looked around for a clock.

Leo walked over, swiping his dirty hands on his pants and pulling a granola bar out of his tool belt. "Hungry?" he asked through a mouthful of the snack.

"Indeed. Do you have another?"

He rummaged around (she saw at least two packs of Mentos) before he found what he wanted: a chocolate chip–peanut butter chewy granola bar. "Who'd've thought these were normal shop supplies?" he joked as he tossed it to her.

She caught it, tore it open, and bit down tentatively. Surprisingly, it didn't taste stale or oily. "Do you know what time it is?" she asked before she took another bite.

He glanced at his watch. " _Dos y media, mi reina_."

Two-thirty? Reyna was pretty sure the end-of-war celebration began with an address from Chiron at the amphitheater at three. "Should we be going?"

"Sure," he said, sounding unenthusiastic, but he washed his hands and ushered her toward the door. Buford tried to follow them out, but Leo shoved it back inside before he slammed the door shut. "I really do have to fix that," he muttered.

Reyna and Leo walked slowly out of the forest and across the campsite toward the amphitheater, not talking much. She considered asking about how he'd come across Bunker Nine, or Buford for that matter, but she kept her eyes to the path. They made it there only a few minutes early, and they split then; she went to sit with her Romans and he with his other Six of the Great Prophecy. It stabbed Reyna a little in the chest to see that Jason and Piper were back, but she stifled the useless emotion. Her other praetor didn't seem to be looking for her. At the moment he seemed to be looking for Piper's tonsils. She turned away.

At three on the dot, Chiron addressed the two camps cheerily, talking about how great it was they'd been able to work together to defeat Gaea and how excited he was to see them continue to get along as demigods. It reminded Reyna of what she'd been told mortal schools said on the first and last days of school, and to be honest she didn't pay a ton of attention. She watched the colors of the midafternoon bonfire and thought of Scipio and her poor dogs, left in a kennel for the week.

She did listen for her name, and it helped her not make a total fool of herself when Chiron thanked her publicly for her cooperation. He praised her and asked her to stand. She did, briefly, and everyone clapped, but she couldn't help feeling it was half-hearted—until someone let out an earsplitting wolf whistle. Wincing, she glared around to see who the culprit was, and her gaze landed on Leo, grinning with two fingers in his mouth. She sat back down, trying to look extra prim in case her cheeks looked as warm as they felt.

After thanking the Seven and the two camps as wholes, Chiron dismissed them at four-thirty for an early and fabulous dinner. Actually hungry this time, Reyna was able to appreciate all the food available to them. They still had the magically refilling plates and cups (she devoured steak and potatoes and jelly beans and skim milk as properly as she could), but there was also a dessert table that seemed never to end, and after several plates of éclairs and brownies and basically everything else they offered, a very full Reyna followed the masses of demigods out to the arena for some of the best sword-fighting displays she'd seen in a while.

After the sun had set, though, the camps began to head for a fireworks display on the Long Island Sound beach, and all the food and activities were starting to catch up with Reyna. She was hanging back, trying to analyze whether she could skip it without being criticized for it later, when someone hooked their arm around hers.

"Do not—" she started, turning to pull away, but Leo grinned at her indefatigably.

"You look torn," he declared. "Want to come watch me work again?"

"Like I don't have anything better to do," she snarked. "I'm beginning to think you think I can't entertain myself."

"That's a yes, then," Leo translated, tugging her toward the forest with a grin.

* * *

Reyna didn't realize she had fallen asleep until she woke up, her cheek sticky against some slick metal tool. Afraid she'd drooled in her sleep, she hastily peeled her face off the tool on the table, but her mouth was dry. Maybe it was sweat—she realized she was quite warm. It took her a second to remember where she was, but she saw Leo across the bunker, hunkered down by some half-crafted machine or another, a big fire blazing in a bucket beside him. He hadn't noticed that she was awake, but if she'd learned anything yesterday it was that he could get very caught up in his work. She slumped up into a straighter sitting position, undid her messy braid, ran her fingers through her hair, and began to rebraid it when she saw him do something she hadn't expected: Leo reached  _right into the flaming bucket, picked up a handful of white-hot wires, and began to route them into the machine_.

"¿ _Qué haces_?" she demanded loudly.

Leo's head jerked up and he looked over her way. He had gone a little pale. He stuck the rest of the wires in where they went, dusted off his hands, and walked over to her. "Morning,  _reina_ ," he said with a grin, probably hoping she would drop it.

She wouldn't. "What was that?" she asked, her tone sharp. None of her Vulcan demigods had ever done such a dangerous thing. Was he stupid?

Leo cocked his head and looked her over. "Only the most awesome demigods get special superpowers," he grinned.

"Superpowers?"

His expression halfway between cocky and concerned, he held up his hand. There was some oil smeared on it, but no burns, or even scars of past burns. She was mildly impressed, and he knew it. "That's not all," he said, leaning more towards cocky now, and without warning his entire hand burst into flames. She took a step back, but he had the fire under control. He even tossed it from hand to hand, the show-off.

"What is that?"

"Pyrokinetics. It's a once-in-a-billion-years Hephaestus thing." Leo's proud grin was mischievous, belying the obvious care he took to control what could be—and had probably been before—a raging inferno. Maybe it hadn't been very Roman of Percy to turn down power, but Leo hadn't turned his down, if that was even an option. He'd taken it and made use of it.

Reyna had to wrench her gaze away from his hands. "This is why the others think you're a—?"

"Scary freak?" he completed.

"Yes."

"Yep," he said, letting the  _p_  pop. For a moment his grin slipped, and she saw the underlying concern: Did she feel the same way? Was she going to run screaming in fear, never to speak civilly to him again?

Not likely. Reyna tilted her chin up just a bit, the corners of her lips turning upwards. "Cool," she said, the pun foreign on her lips. Foreign but accurate. Jokes didn't make him less powerful. Her stomach had grown ticklishly warm, and she was fairly certain it wasn't from the heat of the fire.

Leo looked her in the eye, his curls dusting his forehead, pleasure and relief darting through his typical elfin grin, but then he only turned back toward his work, and Reyna was surprised to find she was disappointed.


	3. Act Three: Camp Half-Blood

Leo insisted he had a coffee maker in the bunker, but it was a hand-me-down and Reyna didn't trust it, so she took a mini-flamethrower (so she could get back in, obviously) and walked down to the Big House to pick up big cups of coffee and hot chocolate. She was fairly certain Leo hadn't slept at all last night, so she made sure to super-size his coffee. Dropping five jumbo marshmallows into the top of her chocolate, she pressed lids onto both cups and made her way back to the bunker.

"I come bearing gifts, camp-bomber," she called once she blasted the door open, speaking louder than necessary so he would be sure to hear her.

Leo swaggered up to meet her, reaching out for his coffee. "Thankee kindly,  _mi_   _reina_ ," he grinned, dark circles under his eyes, and she handed him the bigger cup, trying to ignore the tingling in her stomach when he lilted that  _r_. Instead she looked away and stuck the flamethrower back in the pocket of her jeans.

"Did you sleep at all?" she asked.

"No," he said, looking entirely unbothered by it. After he took a long drink, he looked at her with a little more spark (ha). "Want to meet someone?"

"I'm not exactly a people person," Reyna said, something he probably should have figured out already.

Leo shrugged. "He's not a people," he replied, and since she didn't have anything better to do until the canoe races later, she went with him.

The someone was in fact not a people, as it happened. He was a bronze dragon, or rather the head of a bronze dragon, to be exact. The figurehead of the  _Argo II_ , a ship that had fired on New Rome and warred against Gaea and sailed Reyna to Camp Half-Blood. She was amazed it had made it as far as it had.

"Reyna, Festus the dragon," Leo introduced her. "Festus, Reyna." She looked it over, evaluating—it couldn't breathe fire, could it? The dragon head seemed friendly enough, the way it clicked and squeaked at Leo. Its ruby eyes stared blankly at her, but she sensed it could see her. She offered her fists (could it smell?), and the golden dragon nuzzled its nose against her fingers, emitting a creak that sounded like  _AYY-nah_.

"He likes you too, queen-face," Leo said, sounding like he couldn't decide whether to be pleased or confused or amazed. "My peeps have good taste."

"Your 'peeps' being a disembodied dragon head and a walking table, repair boy?" Reyna clarified.

He shrugged. "Good organic peeps are much harder to come by."

"You do know  _festus_  means  _happy_  in Latin, right? Happy the Dragon?"

His smile faded a bit. "Yeah, Jason pointed it out. Back when Festus was . . . self-sufficient."

Reyna pressed her lips together. Jason. She looked away, but after a second Leo was clapping his dragon on the neck and leading Reyna back toward civilization.

"So we have an hour til lunch, and then canoe races," he was saying, but his fingers were brushing the small of her back and she was having trouble concentrating.

"I should probably go socialize with the rest of humanity," she said, half rolling out of his touch so she could think straight.

"Cool, cool," he said, sticking his hands into his pockets and looking away from her. "I have stuff to do, so yeah. But you have the blowtorch, so you can come back whenever." The way he said  _whenever_ , it seemed to mean _when you cease to have anything better to do_. A little hurtful, but she didn't argue. If she spent much more time in Bunker Nine, her Romans were going to think she'd gone back to Camp Jupiter.

When they came out of the forest, he stayed behind, giving her a little push forward. She looked back, offended. "Say hi to Jason for me," he said, not quite meeting her gaze, and then he headed back into the greenery toward the bunker.

Reyna's eyebrows drew together. Jason was possibly the last person she had planned to seek out. Annabeth was a more probable choice. The daughter of Min—Athena might be willing to cross blades for an hour or so before lunch. Having missed her morning run, she felt like she was slacking.

As Fortuna would have it, Annabeth actually met her on the way to the cabin. "Morning, Reyna," she said, sounding much cheerier than most people did before noon.

"Morning."

"Where did you run off to last night?" the blonde asked. "I looked for you at the fireworks, but you'd disappeared. Did you sit with some of your campers?"

Reyna shook her head. "No, I actually . . . I was tired, and I didn't even realize I fell asleep."

"Really? I didn't think I saw you in bed—"

Eager to change the subject, the praetor suddenly noticed that Annabeth had ballpoint-ink notes scribbled up and down her forearms. "What are those about?" she asked, gesturing.

"Oh!" Annabeth brightened. "Well, I had this idea for inverted vaulted ceilings in a dome with an oculus like the Pantheon, but I was trying to figure out if the. . ." She launched into a detailed lecture on the potential designs for Olympian and Greco-Roman architecture, but Reyna could only keep up with about half of it. Design wasn't exactly her area of expertise. It ranked slightly below emotions and people.

"So did you have a plan for the canoe race?" Annabeth asked, jolting Reyna out of her thoughts.

"I hadn't thought about it."

"I had thought you might like—"

"Hey, Annabeth!" Piper trotted over, smiling brightly. What was it with all these morning people? Was that a Greek thing? "Oh, hi, Reyna. What are you guys doing before lunch?"

"We're doing it," Annabeth said before Reyna could interject.

"Great!" Piper beamed. "I was talking to Jason and Frank and Hazel, and we thought it might be fun to—Oh, there he is! What a slacker. Jason!" She looked past the two girls and waved. Reyna turned in time to see the guy in question strolling their way, cocking one hand in a wave in return. He clasped Reyna on the shoulder as he passed, but he wheeled around to stand beside Piper. Reyna could have sworn Piper's lips quirked upward, though she made sure her own expression didn't waver.

"We thought it might be fun to do our canoe stuff together," Piper finished. "The Seven, plus you, Reyna, I mean, you're totally welcome."

"Oh, I don't—"

"You should," Jason said. "It'll be fun. You could work with Piper and me."

Piper blinked like he hadn't mentioned  _that_  detail earlier, but Annabeth seemed in favor of it. "It would be good for you, Reyna," said the daughter of Athena. Reyna was beginning to wish people would stop sticking her name at the end of every sentence. "The Romans would be encouraged to see two of the praetors participating, and with a Greek head counselor, no less."

Oh, sure, bring up her Romans. "I guess it couldn't hurt," Reyna said, knowing very well it could (and probably would). "Are you—?"

"Percy and I are going with Grover," Annabeth said. "We're actually meeting, like, now, so I have to go. But you three have fun!" And with that she was gone, leaving Reyna alone with Piper and Jason.

They stood there looking at each other awkwardly until Reyna asked, "So do we have to build the canoe, or what?"

Piper laughed. "Um, no, I think they're provided," she said.

Reyna didn't see how that was a ridiculous question.

"Do you guys know how to canoe?" Jason asked.

"I think I can manage," said Reyna as Piper asked, "Could we take a practice trip around the lake?"

Jason and Reyna looked at the daughter of Aphrodite. Reyna thought,  _No thanks_ , but Jason said, "Sure, why not?" He glanced at his fellow praetor to make sure she was up for it. "You okay to come with? It would probably be a good idea."

She opened her mouth to say  _I would really rather not_ , but he was looking at her with pleading blue eyes,  _please do this for me_  blue eyes, and she couldn't get the words out. "Sure," she sighed, palms up, and he grinned.

"All right, let's go practice kicking everyone's butts," he declared, throwing an arm around each girl's shoulders and leading them toward the lake. Reyna walked stiffly, but Piper seemed cozy enough in Jason's side. The shed did not appear quickly enough.

The canoes were actually out on the shore already, presumably so anyone could practice if they wanted, so Jason had the girls clamber into one (Reyna left her mini-flamethrower on the grass) before he pushed it into the water. Reyna took one paddle and Piper took the other, and Jason tried to take both of them himself before Reyna called him out on it. So she kept hers and Jason took Piper's, and the three of them began to push their way across the lake.

Piper trailed her fingers in the water. Reyna's shirt felt much too thin in the cool morning air, even more so when something nipped at Piper's hand and she jerked away from the water, flailing her hand and spraying the lake water across both the rowers.

Jason only chuckled, but Reyna wiped the droplets from her skin as quickly as she could. Thankfully, what little had soaked through her shirt wasn't enough to really chill her, but that didn't mean she liked it. "That's freezing!" she exclaimed.

"So don't fall in," Jason teased.

"It's not that cold, I didn't think," Piper put in, looking over the edge as if deciding whether it was safe to put her hand back in the water. "It's actually pretty warm for the morning."

Reyna pressed her lips shut and rowed. She had no interest in debating it. Mostly because she knew she was right, and demanding Piper acknowledge that would only make her look insecure.

Unfortunately, perceived insecurity was the least of her problems. Because as the three of them made it almost to the opposite shoreline, Jason began to turn them sharply to go around the perimeter, just as something big (maybe whatever bit Piper's hand) went  _BU-BUMP_  under the canoe. The three of them wobbled, trying to keep their balance, and they might have been all right had Reyna not instinctively reached out for the back edge of the canoe. The extra misbalance was all they needed. Rearing up like an ocean wave about to crest over, the canoe tipped over in heavy slow motion, dumping the three of them into the freezing cold water.

Reyna squeezed her eyes shut just before she hit the water, not wanting anything to sting her eyes, but she immediately wished she had taken that above-water moment to, say, breathe. Her lungs already burned for air. She wasn't sure which way was up, so she curled into a ball, hoping the air in her lungs would raise her to the surface on its own. Again, a plan that might have worked out all right if not for external circumstances.

Reyna felt herself rising more quickly—the surface was near! thank the gods!—but then a blindingly sharp pain cracked across the back of her head, shocking her so much she accidentally gasped. The mouthful of lake water did not go over well. She coughed desperately, not even noticing when she broke the surface of the water and a pair of strong arms pulled her up onto the shore. Shivering, she could only roll over and hack, certain she was going to drown on dry land.

But eventually the water left her throat, and she found she was miraculously still alive, though freezing cold and soaked through. The strong arms came back around her and pulled her close, rubbing her on the back in an effort to warm her up. Smearing the water from her face with the heel of her hand, she looked up into Jason's face.

"You're really cold," he said.

"I'm f—f—f—freezing," she said, glaring through her chattering teeth.

Now that she wasn't spitting up water, he hugged her closer, pressing her face against ribs. "Piper went to find us all changes of clothes," he said, like she cared at all where Piper had gone. Actually, she probably wouldn't have noticed the other girl was gone, given that all she could see right now was the wet T-shirt sticking to Jason's chest. Then she felt his fingers on the back of her head, and he swore in Latin. "What happened?" Thankfully he let her go, although it wasn't exactly encouraging to see the red staining his fingers.

"Cracked my head on something," Reyna muttered. The cold water had numbed the pain a little, but now that the wound had her attention it was starting to sting again. Plus, there was the practical problem that the blood would be a pain to get out of her hair and clothes. She hoped her shirt wouldn't stain.

"Probably the canoe."

"Ugh," she said, curling her knees to her chest. Jason continued to rub her back fiercely, and she was deciding whether or not to order him to leave her be when footsteps approached.

"I have clothes," said Piper's voice, and a guy with her mumbled something that sounded like a good-natured " _You_  have them?" Reyna looked up to see the daughter of Aphrodite kneeling by Jason, one hand on his shoulder, with a guy from her cabin standing behind her with an armful of clothing options. Piper tugged on Jason, who stood and in turn pulled Reyna to her feet. She stumbled, her vision going black for a second.

"Oh my gods. Are you okay?" Piper asked, sounding honestly concerned as she touched Reyna's sticky hair. "Mitchell, run and get Will Solace." Mitchell handed over the clothes and ran off toward the basketball courts.

"I did warn her not to fall in," Jason said in a teasing tone, but both of the girls glared at him.

"Shut up, Sparky," Piper said, helping Reyna sit back down in the sand before Piper and Jason took a seat on either side of her.


	4. Act Four: Camp Half-Blood

Reyna didn't feel it was worth putting on new clothes just to dirty them, so she stayed in her clinging, wet jeans and purple T-shirt, shivering on the grass, until Mitchell reappeared with another demigod, presumably Will Solace, a son of Apollo by the look of him. Will crouched on his haunches beside her. She felt she might have spent more brainpower on him if she hadn't been smelly, bleeding, and soaked with lake water.

"Can you lean your head forward?" he asked, motioning, and she complied. He undid her half-fallen-out braid, flipped her hair over her bent head, and gently began to trace his fingertips over her scalp, looking for the cut. He found it; she winced. She felt pretty pathetic, but he didn't comment. Maybe he was used to pathetic injured people. At Camp Jupiter, anything short of being impaled didn't merit whimpering.

More blood was trickling down her neck as Will began to sing a hymn to Apollo under his breath. The back of Reyna's head tickled for a moment, and then the blood stopped flowing, and when he touched her scalp again it didn't hurt.

"Thanks," she said, tentatively raising her head back up.

"No problem," he replied with a blinding grin. "It wasn't too bad of a gash. You'll live to fight another day."

"Great," she repeated, embarrassed to have been laid low by "not too bad of a gash."

He pulled a Ziploc bag of ambrosia out of his pocket, broke off a corner, and handed it to her with what sounded like fine print: "Try not to hurt yourself again in the next few days, and if you feel nauseated or feverish come find me . . ."

Piper thanked Will too, making his grin widen, and as he left she helped Reyna to her feet. "Come on, let's change," she prompted, looping her arm through the Latina praetor's, and Jason barely managed to catch the orange T-shirt and shorts his girlfriend tossed him before she scooped up all the rest of the clothes.

Piper took Reyna to one of the girls' bathhouses, and Reyna had a happy five seconds when she thought it might not turn into Say Yes to the Dress. But Piper's time in the Aphrodite cabin had apparently awoken her, a little, to the possibilities of fashion. She didn't try anything extraordinary, but she picked through the pile with a critical eye, and even the long tank top and short shorts that she eventually decided on somehow seemed more fashionable on her.

Reyna found a fitted grey T-shirt and khaki cargo capris, and that was good enough for her. Thank Fortuna, Piper didn't try to get her in anything fancier. The choppy-haired girl sent the leftover clothes back to the Aphrodite cabin with her younger half-sister Lacy, and the two finished rinsing the lake out of their hair just in time to meet Jason outside the bathhouse. He looked perfectly fine, of course. Next to him and Kaleidoscope Eyes, Reyna felt like a wet, bedraggled raccoon. How heartening.

The canoe escapade had taken almost a full hour, so the three of them met Percy, Annabeth, Frank, and Hazel by the dining pavilion for lunch. Frank's nose wrinkled as they approached. "What'd you guys do, take a bath in the lake?" he joked.

"Yes," Reyna said shortly.

He turned a mottled pink and said nothing more.

"Have any of you seen Leo?" Percy asked. "I haven't seen him around much the last few days, except maybe at yesterday afternoon's bonfire."

Reyna wasn't going to say anything, but when the only responses were shrugs and mutters, she felt obligated to offer, "I think he's been working."

Annabeth looked her over analytically, which concerned her, but the others took it at (slightly surprised) face value.

"Hey, my peeps!" Leo popped out from a crowd of Demeter kids—as in literally jumped out—and trotted up with an oil-smudged grin. "I know you all missed me, but fear no more, I'm here now."

Reyna turned to look him over and estimate how much of his grin was authentic, but that was about when he noticed that she reeked of lake. "You look a little damp, queen-face," he commented.

"Thank you for your input," she said, gripping her wet clothes a little more tightly.

He grinned until he noticed that Jason also smelled fishy. Then his smile dimmed, and he began to tug on his suspenders. "Are we gonna eat, or what?"

* * *

Lunch was a surprise: Chiron let everyone move around from table to table as they ate, and Reyna couldn't decide whether or not she appreciated it. Yes, it was more Roman, and she felt less restricted, but at the same time it wasn't exactly like she had tons of people clamoring to eat with her. Mostly she just followed the Seven around, or just sat and ate at a corner table until someone came up with a question about the legion. Thrilling, not to mention heart-warming.

Then it was time for the canoe races, and as soon as Jason and Piper looked her way she shook her head no, as in NO NO  _NO_  did they think she was crazy? So they picked up Dakota instead, began to enthusiastically trash-talk the Percy-Annabeth-Grover canoe, and left Reyna with Leo. She glanced at him, and she found him already looking her way; his hands began to spark and he looked away.

"Wonder where we can get the best view?" she asked.

He scanned the lakeside area. "Probably over there," he said finally, pointing to a portion of grass and sand on almost the complete opposite side, so that was where they headed, picking their way through mud and around little clusters of people waiting for the races to begin.

They sat down, and Reyna noticed he had a pint of ice cream in his hands. Belgian Chocolate Chocolate, possibly the most delicious Häagen-Dazs flavor in existence. "Don't even try to convince me that came out of your tool belt," she challenged him.

Leo sucked a spoonful of heaven and smiled. "Nah," he said. "Brought it back from the dining pavilion. You'd be amazed what shows up on a plate if you ask for it."

She stared at it. If she had only  _known_.

He noticed her interest. "You want some?" he offered, holding out his spoon.

She had never been a germs-and-cooties kind of girl. She took it without hesitation. "Thanks," she said as she stuck a giant spoonful into her mouth, but it came out more like  _Shainksh_ , and she half-choked it down trying not to laugh. He laughed anyway. She covered her smile with her hand.

Leaning back on his elbows, Leo's gaze wandered to Reyna's lake-soaked clothes sitting in a pile by her side. "So what happened there?" he asked offhandedly. "You and Jason in a canoe, K-I-S-S-I-N-G?"

"Right." Reyna rolled her eyes. "Piper was in the canoe too, lowly mortal. I know it was hard to tell. We were practicing for the race and it tipped over." She had no intention of bringing up the canoe-to-the-head part of the incident, but before she could stop him, Leo picked up her still-wet purple shirt and held up his overheated hand to help dry it off. He didn't miss the red stains around the neckline.

"Gods!" He dropped the shirt, then tentatively picked it back up by the seam on the side. "Is that—?"

"I cracked my head on the edge of the canoe," she admitted. "But an Apollo guy fixed me right up, and he said it was no problem."

"No problem. No problem," Leo repeated, sounding offended. "Canoes are a bane to mankind. I propose we ban them all."

"Don't be ridiculous." She rolled her eyes and took another bite of ice cream. "This would be better with . . . sprinkles, I think. Or gummy worms."

He gave her a disapproving look, like she needed to take her head gash and half-drowning more seriously.

"Or jelly beans," she considered. "Jelly beans improve everything."

Leo looked at her, his head cocked, a smile spreading slowly across his face. " _Reina_ ," he said, "it's nice to meet you."

"You too," she said. And a whistle blew, marking the beginning of the race and eliciting cheers worthy of Narcissus' fangirls, but she only passed him back his Häagen-Dazs and asked if he preferred gummy worms or jelly beans.

 _Gummy worms_ , he said with a teasing grin.  _Always gummy worms._


	5. Act Five: Camp Half-Blood

The morning of the last full day at Camp Half-Blood, after Reyna went for her run at seven and showered at eight, she picked up a hot chocolate and a coffee from the Big House and met a sleepy-eyed Leo out by Hestia's fireplace at nine. The mechanic took his cup with a lazy smile and a "morning,  _reina_." She nodded shortly and took a sip of her chocolate. The marshmallows bumped against her lips at the lid.

"What do we get to do this fine day?" he asked after he'd inhaled half his liquid caffeine. Fine day? Reyna eyed some dark clouds on the horizon, but even as she watched they were parting and passing by. Huh. The weather at Camp Half-Blood took some getting used to.

"I don't recall," she said.

"Lies. You memorized the schedule as soon as Chiron set it up."

"Flattery will get you nowhere. There was at least a five-minute interval between the two."

Leo chuckled into his coffee.

Chiron and Mr. D had shared the schedule with the praetors before they left Camp Jupiter, but Jason had promptly lost his copy, so that left her as the only one who knew what was happening before it happened. "I don't think there's anything until evening," Reyna said finally. "More fireworks, a bonfire. And something about pizza."  _Peet-sah_ , she pronounced it. A foreign word, a foreign concept.

"Pizza party? Yes!" Leo pumped one scrawny fist. "Magic plates got nothing on good old-fashioned take-out."

She raised an eyebrow and took another sip of marshmallow-foamed hot chocolate. He noticed her lack of enthusiasm.

"Not big on pizza,  _reina_?"

Reina set her weight on her hip and looked away, touching her cup to her mouth again so she wouldn't smile. "It's never come up."

"Never come up . . ." He stared at her for a moment before it clicked. "How can you possibly never have had pizza?" he demanded.

She shrugged. "It's greasy. It's tacky. If the auras can bring me steak and grilled asparagus, why on earth would I order something that tastes like the box it came in?"

He gaped, horrified. "We must correct this," he said, patting her on the arm. "At dinner you sit with us, okay? Percy and I will educate you on the wonders of pizza."

Still skeptical, she opened her mouth to dissent, but she was cut off by the loud appearance of the rest of the Seven, accompanied by Dakota, who was gleefully passing out plastic cups of red Kool-Aid.

"At least wait until it's after noon, centurion," she ordered, falling into praetor mode immediately, but the son of Bacchus only gave her a red-stained grin and stumbled off with a cup in each hand. She sighed and pressed her fingertips to her forehead.

"Don't worry about it," Annabeth reassured her as she and the others poured their over-sugared drinks into the grass. "We were just looking for you guys, actually. We were going to go hang out at the Sound, just for something fun to do. Want to come with?"

"It would hardly be fun if we didn't," Leo said, crooking his arms akimbo. "Being the life of the party and all. Yeah, we'll come. When?"

"Now," Percy prompted. So Leo hooked his arm through Reyna's (she immediately shook him off), they assimilated into the group of six, and all eight headed for the beach.

* * *

The weather was perfect for the outing—warm but overcast, with just a breath of wind so it wasn't too hot. Reyna helped Annabeth spread a big quilt on the sand, where the girls pulled off their shoes and settled down as the guys wandered nearby, kicking sand at each other and throwing broken shells and generally goofing off.

"I like having you guys here," Piper said amiably, her eyes on Jason. "The Romans, I mean. It's nice to see the two camps getting along and not, you know, shooting at each other and fighting to the death."

Reyna knew her well enough, or at least knew enough about her, to realize that if it did come to that, the Aphrodite girl would have no qualms charmspeaking everyone into a dazed ceasefire. She admired her loyalty, although at times she questioned the object of it.

"It certainly has been encouraging," Annabeth said, in a tone like there was more she could have said but was refraining from. She nudged Hazel and flicked a finger toward Frank: the big guy was out the furthest in the water, and every time a wave crashed into him, he lurched forward and his shirt clung a little tighter to him. Flushing, Hazel began to fan her face and stared deliberately up into the clouds.

"Have you been enjoying yourself, Reyna?" Piper asked out of the blue. Reyna snapped to attention to find the other girl looking at her with concern in her green-blue-brown eyes. It was disorienting.

"Yes," Reyna said, though it came out more like a question.

"Are you sure?" she pressed, and even Hazel looked down to watch her answer. "I feel like we've hardly seen you, and after everything—"

"I know," Reyna interrupted her. She wasn't particularly interested in reliving the last few months, even if Jason's girlfriend meant well. War was hard enough the first time around, and she had learned long ago that the way to deal was to win, to learn from her mistakes, and not to dwell on the past. Actually, that applied to a lot of things, although she was the first to admit that Bellona's children tended to see everything as a battle. "It's been an . . . enlightening experience. I think it has been for the best."

"Enlightening?" Piper repeated, sounding wounded, but Annabeth interceded.

"I imagine it's been a unique chance to make friends without warfare in the background," the blonde suggested, and Reyna shrugged in neutral agreement.

"Friends are good," Percy agreed, coming up from behind to give his girl a sopping wet hug. She squeaked and tried to writhe out of it, but he held her tightly, laughing. Reyna was pretty sure she'd seen him swim and come back dry before, so he had very likely soaked himself for the express purpose of also soaking Annabeth. She watched them neutrally, but a faintly jealous curiosity twisted in her gut.

"Hey," Frank said to Hazel, plopping down next to her with a smile. Reyna looked away before she could see how Jason greeted Piper. No need to wound herself any more than was necessary for good public relations.

Leo hopped into the middle of the circle, lacing his fingers behind his head as he grinned up at them all. He seemed the driest of the guys—not because he hadn't gone into the water, but because it seemed to evaporate faster from him. Maybe he had lava for blood. Reyna wouldn't doubt it. "I think it would be good for you guys to try out the water," he suggested, referring to the girls who had so far (with the exception of Annabeth) managed to stay totally dry, and mostly sand-free. "It's perfect today. Like me, but with more potential for stepping on something sharp."

"I don't know, I think they're about even, especially when you work all night and don't clean up afterward," Reyna found herself saying, and a solid ten seconds passed where the others stared at her, trying to figure out whether she was teasing.  _Did she even know what humor was_  seemed to be the general consensus. Leo was the first to laugh.

"Okay," he allowed, grinning elfishly, full blast at her. She looked over her shoulder to adjust her braid, hoping her complexion was enough to hide the heat in her cheeks. "But I still vote we all hit the water."

"No," Reyna protested, but the other girls were grumbling and getting up, and she was pulled into the line of demigods. All eight of them approached the shoreline at once. Sand stuck to Reyna's bare feet already, and the first touch of water hit her hard, freezing cold between the toes. She shivered and went up on tiptoes, but they kept going, the water smacking her on the knees, the thighs, hitting her harder and colder the deeper they got. Percy seemed to be enjoying it, but she was ready to leave. Cold was not her thing.

"Oh, by the way," Leo brought up when they were all up to their necks, shivering and getting hit in the face with the hardest waves yet, "Reyna has never had pizza before. So at the pizza party tonight—"

"There's a pizza party tonight?" The guys cheered. Even the girls looked interested, although Hazel seemed iffy.

"Yeah. So tonight, she has to try it, right?"

"Yes!" Percy and Jason looked appalled, much like Leo had when he first heard the terrible news.

Piper, whose left arm was linked through Reyna's right, tugged on her like they were old friends. "You have to try it, at least once. It's like a critical part of life, even for a vegetarian."

"Okay," Reyna said hurriedly, eager to refocus the attention on someone or something other than herself. "C–c–can we just get out of the water now, p–p–please?"

* * *

That evening, the dining pavilion smelled like grease. As in, Reyna could smell it from the  _amphitheater_ , it smelled like grease. She wasn't excited, but she had promised the others she would give pizza a fair chance, and she was nothing if not fair and good on her word. So she sat down across from Annabeth, with Jason on her left and Leo on her right, and she stared at the stacks of steaming, greasy pizza boxes sitting in the middle of the table. Had they actually ordered mortal food service for this?

Chiron was overlooking the crazed pavilion with something between hesitance and amusement. Mr. D filled up his Diet Coke and motioned for a satyr to fetch him something. Percy and Leo were talking over each other, trying to explain why pizza was second only to cheeseburgers in the blessings of the gods. The demigods of both camps were crowding around the tables, clambering for the seats closest to the food, shouting and shoving and stomping like pizza was worth decapitation. Reyna doubted it was.

Chiron said something loudly, and although the words themselves were lost in the rabble, the message was received. Instantly the lids were torn off pizza boxes and slices were ripped right from each other, dropped hot and oily onto magic plates that could only hope to offer vegetable-based side dishes. Leo grabbed two slices of pepperoni, Percy three of cheese, Jason three of barbeque chicken. Reyna didn't remember him liking barbeque anything before his displacement.

"Grab shumfing, quick!" Leo urged her, motioning to the rapidly disappearing entrées, half of one slice already shoved in his mouth. Hesitantly she reached in, slapped Percy's hand away from the cheese pizza, strung out one slice from the pie, and dropped it onto her plate. By the grace of the gods, some squash and zucchini appeared beside it.

Pizza hanging out of their mouths, the Seven were watching her.

"Can I use silverware?" she asked.

Seven demigods of prophecy snapped, "No!"

"Okay," she muttered, and she tried to get as little grease on her fingers as possible as she picked up her slice of pizza. She stretched her long fingers as far as she could to hold up the crust and sides and tip all at the same time, and, cringing, she opened her mouth and bit into the slice.

"Gods!" she swore, almost dropping the thing. "It's bread and grease!"

"And cheese!" Leo corrected her. "Did you even taste it?"

Reyna took a long drink of skim milk to wash the taste of oil from her tongue.

"Pizza is Italian, isn't it?" Piper asked Hazel. "And Rome is Italian, so . . ."

"This is  _not_  Roman," Reyna said starkly. Her slice was going to stay right where it was on her plate. No way she was doing that again.

"Try dabbing some of the grease off," Annabeth suggested. "That's what I usually do. And sprinkling parmesan is nice too."

"I like ranch on mine," Percy put in, the dressing a thin white smear across the edge of his mouth.

"Here." Leo grabbed a few napkins, physically opened Reyna's hand, closed her fingers around them, and pressed the handful toward her plate. "Annabeth is the master of all things scary and evil, so of course she knows how to weaken the power of pizza."

Reyna unwillingly dabbed the napkins at her slice, suppressing the urge to make a face as she watched the paper sop up grease. A pile of parmesan shavings appeared on the side of her plate, so she sprinkled a few fingerfuls on top, and then she tried again. She chewed thoughtfully.

"Hmm," she mumbled through it before she swallowed. "Not so bad that time."

Leo and Percy high-fived.

She took another bite, and another, and she was surprised to find the slice disappeared more quickly than she would have liked. She pulled one more (only one—she wasn't going to go crazy) from the box of cheese pizza, performed the same anti-grease ritual, and ate that one. Along with several servings of mangos and papayas and grilled peppers.  _Someone_  had to eat responsibly here.

"You owe me a big bag of jelly beans," she said to Leo, who was finishing his fifth slice. He grinned and shrugged agreeably.

Once the ruckus had died down, meaning everyone had filled up at least a little, Chiron stood at the front. Even mortal pizza couldn't distract the demigods from that. "It has been strongly suggested that mere activities do not a celebration make," the centaur said, with a sideways glance at Mr. D. "So tonight, instead another bonfire, we're going to have something of a barn dance."

_That wasn't on the schedule_ , Reyna thought in shock, but a cheer went up, with some whooping from the eldest campers. The younger ones turned white or, in a few impressive cases, purple. Jason and Leo nudged Reyna on either side.

"Gonna get your groove thang on,  _reina_ ," Leo grinned.

"Romans don't dance," Reyna said, just as Dakota began a Kool-Aid–influenced rendition of Gangnam Style. Ugh. Some honor could never be restored.

"Right."

"Well, praetors don't dance," she attempted.

"I'm gonna dance," Percy and Jason said in sync, with identical mischievous looks at their girlfriends.

"Well,  _I_  don't dance," she said firmly—not barn-dance dancing, anyway—and a slightly disapproving Leo dropped the issue after that.

* * *

Reyna hadn't been sure where they would hold a massive dance session, but it turned out that they constructed something special for the occasion. A bunch of Athena and Hephaestus kids—plus probably a sizable chunk of the legion, given the solid, speedy construction—had over the course of the afternoon built, out past the strawberry fields and armory, an open-air dancing square even bigger than the dining pavilion. The ground had been smoothed over, practically razed, and covered with even marble tiles. Corinthian columns marked the four corners, not that Reyna could see the details of more than one at a time, and concrete arches framed the edges in case the more ADHD demigods needed a big visual reference as to where the floor ended. Chinese lanterns (Frank would know whether they were actually Chinese) and garlands of greenery were strung around asymmetrically, and tables of alcohol-free drinks and high-sugar snacks stood just outside the perimeter.

Not bad. Even Reyna was mildly impressed. Of course, that was right up until the actual party began.

Party-giddy demigods swarmed into the square, laughing and chatting amiably. Some wore T-shirts and shorts, but others (mostly teenage girls) had glitzed themselves up like this was the first chance they'd had in years. (Granted, it probably was.) Reyna found herself nearly blinded by neons next to earthy tones, sequins next to stripes, heels next to sandals next to boots.  _Ay_. It was enough to make a sailor seasick, but everyone seemed to be enjoying it.

Apollo kids and Romans with a musical bent started to tune up their instruments and test out microphones, and a few satyrs pulled out pipes to fill the time. Thankfully, the tinny nature music didn't last long before the soulful half-rock boy band took over the sound system. For a song or two the dance floor was empty, but as the music picked up and demigods summoned their courage, it began to fill up.

Feeling a little cold in her clingy black top and dark jeans, Reyna hovered by the south corner of the square. She watched and tugged on her braid, alone. She caught sight of Annabeth and Percy doing a silly mashup of oldies dance moves, of Hazel and Frank awkwardly shifting their weight and pretending to dance, of Jason and Piper spinning each other like their hands knew each other well. A few acne-ridden boys glanced Reyna's way, but as soon as they made eye contact, they paled and hurried to the other side of the square. Clearly she had no hope of company there.

She looked around for Leo, not sure whether he would be standing in a corner as well or trying to woo three girls at once. Surprisingly, she couldn't find him at all.

A daughter of Hephaestus—Nyssa, maybe—passed by, and Reyna tapped her on the shoulder. "Have you seen Leo?" she asked, raising her voice to be heard over Boyz II Godz.

Nyssa shrugged. "I think I heard him say he'd thought of something he needed to fix." She left, and Reyna pursed her lips. Something to fix, really? Leo was a people person, despite his bouts of angst, and he was going to wear himself out if he kept hiding himself away in that bunker. Giving up on the prospect of dancing, she turned on her heel and headed for it herself. She would get him out into the fresh air, or she would at least earn another bag of jelly beans trying.

Pressing through the forest in the dark, Reyna began to regret her particular shoe choice for the evening. She should have known she'd be coming this way, yet for some Venus-cursed reason she had worn strappy black heels, short but slim-pointed enough to want to stick in the grass. Why girls wore these, she would never know. Much too insensible.

Reyna came swearing to the right side of a hill, or at least that's where she hoped she was. She pulled out her little flamethrower and aimed it at the side of the hill, preparing herself for wildfire, but the Eta showed up. (She would deny it later, but she thanked the Greek  _and_  Roman gods for that blessing.) The door slid open, and as she stepped through, she heard Leo's music before she saw Leo. Or heard him, or sensed him at all, really, because the music was  _so incredibly_   _loud_. She wasn't sure how he had managed to amp it up so high without breaking the speakers; she could only assume it was one of his own inventions.

She walked in and saw Leo's back. He stood at the table with all the blueprints, only he wasn't really standing. She recognized his music as salsa, and as he looked over the machine plans he was stepping in time to it, a basic _rumba_  side step. Left, replace, together; right, replace, together. His arms wheeled in easy circles from the elbow. He didn't even seem to be thinking about it.

Circe had encouraged dance lessons as a way of staying graceful and in shape and tuned in to other people. Reyna missed them, but she had never dared to practice since she joined Camp Jupiter. Dancing (especially a type like salsa) wasn't exactly traditional Roman exercise. She itched to try it again.

Leo continued to step in time. The blaring music hit a riff, and he spun in place—their eyes met, and in a second he clamped his hands to the table to stop himself. His hair started to smolder as the music continued to play. He asked her something, but the words were lost before they reached her ears. Tentatively she stepped forward and held out her hands. He took them.

She leaned in and all but yelled in his ear, "How well do you dance?"

He grinned. "How well do  _you_  dance?" he shouted back.

Reyna cocked her head, her lips tilting up in a half-smile. So Leo gripped her right hand in his left, slipped his right hand around her waist. She placed her left hand on his shoulder, which smoked briefly, and then he led her in a basic forward and back, right in time with the music that was murdering her eardrums. It was a fast song but an easy move, and they tossed in a  _rumba_  between a few steps. Reyna knew this. Gaining confidence as muscle memory kicked in, she automatically began to swivel her hips, a clean figure-eight. Salsa,  _yes_.

Keeping up with the music, Leo dropped his hand at her waist and stepped back to lead her through an outside turn, then an inside turn. He led her around himself, raised his hand so she could spin under it— _uno_ ,  _dos_ ,  _tres_. She flicked her free left hand out, and he turned under her right hand, stopping the motion just in time to spin her again, another triple turn under their connected hands. Step forward, step back, come together. She laughed quietly, the sound too low to be heard, but he saw her smile and grinned himself.

He was good, surprisingly so. She had mistakenly assumed that a boy who'd spent his life in machine shops would have minimal coordination, but he knew what he was doing. It crossed her mind to ask him later, but for now it was just them, two bodies moving together to an upbeat salsa song. They held hands in a cross hold until he spun her so she was facing away from him, and in the off-beat she kicked up her thigh, bringing her knee up until she leaned back to pop her hip out on the six-seven count. He led her forward two steps, a firm pressure on both her hands, and then as they stepped backward again she rolled her torso, chest to stomach to hips, just long enough for him to catch her and spin her back to face him.

The music kept blaring, the beat pounding in Reyna's chest, but Leo's rough mechanic fingers were drawing circles on her hips as they stepped together, and she missed a beat. He caught the movement and tugged her closer. They were close now, closer than she would have thought possible a week ago; yet as they stepped in mirror image and she swiveled her hips, she wondered if they might get closer. His face was inches away from hers—she could feel his breath on her cheek. His eyes were as dark as her own, maybe unreadable, but he was looking at her lips and she at his and suddenly the music pressed the two of them together, breathless and warm.

Reyna reached for the back of Leo's neck, and he traced her jawline with his thumb as he kissed her harder, parting only for breath. And the Greek and Roman gods must have been cooperating that day, because  _ay_ , it was good.

He laughed lightly against her mouth.  _Querida_ , he breathed. And she decided that she liked meeting him like this.


	6. Act Six: Camp Jupiter

Reyna thought it was strange how in the course of twelve hours, everything could change for her, yet for everyone else seem exactly the same.

The Greeks saw the Romans off the next morning, all the demigods still exhausted from the late night. After brunch, the latter group loaded up onto the  _Argo II_ , which was piloted by Leo this time, and they were up in the air by noon. Reyna stayed on deck in an effort to improve her attitude toward flying ships, but most of her campers retreated to the cabins below-deck to finish catching up on sleep, and she envied them a little.

Though they weren't far yet, she did think this trip was going a little better than the first one, maybe because of the change in pilots. The ride seemed a little smoother this time around, and it helped that she was on friendly terms with the fire-breathing figurehead. She hung out in the forecastle, watching the sails whip and the earth pass by in a blur beneath them. Briefly she wondered what the mortals saw—an airplane, a giant bird, a UFO? Probably not a giant flying warship toting several hundred sleepy demigods from Long Island to San Francisco.

"I picked this up before we left,  _reina_. Thought you might want it for the trip." She started at the voice. Leo had sneaked up behind her while she was thinking, an impressive feat for one so boisterous. His black curls were mussed and his hands were sticky with oil, but he held out a jumbo bag of jelly beans.

Reyna took it, careful not to get any of the oil on her own hands. "Thanks," she said, tearing it open at one corner and pouring some into her hand. Good stuff, right there. As she snacked, Leo shifted his weight and leaned up against the rail next to her, pulling a tiny automaton prototype out of his pocket and fiddling with it.

"So," he prompted her eventually.

She swallowed her mouthful of candy. "So?" Did he want some? She held out the bag, and he accepted a handful, but that didn't seem to be what he'd meant.

"So last night, we had a thing." The automaton scurried up his arm as his fingers started to spark.

Reyna felt a little warmer inside just thinking about it. "Yes," she said, keeping her expression neutral. She didn't want to influence him one way or another about it.

He seemed to want to be influenced, though. He studied her lack of a reaction like he was looking for something. "Are we—you think it might happen again?"

"Might," she said carefully, popping a few jelly beans to calm her pulse. "Were you planning on jumping me in the near future?"

Leo choked, a strange mix of emotions crossing his face: anxiety, excitement, embarrassment. His hair began to smoke. "I—"

She cracked a smile then, just a small one. "Relax." Adjusting her purple T-shirt, she looked up at the sails and changed the subject. "I like your ship better when you're driving it."

"Thanks." Leo puffed his chest out just a little, looking over his baby with pride scrawled all over his face. It took a second for the sideways compliment to sink in. "Wait, when  _I_ —?"

"Reyna?" One of the younger campers trotted up to her, an eight-year-old legacy from the First Cohort, with his arms around his green-faced twin brother. "Marcus isn't feeling so . . ."

Marcus promptly vomited all over Reyna's tennis shoes.

Reyna closed her eyes, pretended the dripping substance was potato soup, reopened her eyes, and leaned down to get on the twins' eye level. "You're a little seasick," she said calmly. "We've all had it, and it'll pass. For now, go down to the bottom level at stern and either watch the horizon or try to take a nap." To Marcus' brother she added, "I think Leo keeps extra buckets around here somewhere. He can show you where."

Leo nodded, though looking faintly sick himself. He herded the boys away, but not before giving Reyna a  _we'll talk about this later_  look.

Great. Right now, though, her first priority was to get cleaned up.

* * *

The rest of the trip wasn't as remarkable. None of the other Romans seemed too bothered by the ship's motions, so Reyna didn't get puked on again; and Leo hid out in the engine room while she visited the campers who needed her, so she didn't see him until he was up and about again toward the end of the day, preparing to land the  _Argo II_ , and even then she didn't talk to him. Which was probably for the best, because she found it very hard to be coherent when he was looking at her with those dark eyes and calling her  _reina_.

After everyone had unloaded from the ship and was dispersing, Reyna made her way toward the Principia through the crowds of stumbling campers. She met one of the kennel keepers out with two automaton greyhounds, struggling to keep them on their leashes as they snarled at Octavian. She took pity on the keeper, though not on the augur.

Reyna whistled sharply and clapped her hands once. "Aurum! Argentum!"

The dogs immediately straightened and looked over at her. This time the keeper, a girl named Natalya, was pulled along behind them as they rushed their owner, wriggling and barking and wagging their tails. Reyna rubbed the tops of their heads as she looked over the frazzled keeper. "How were they for you?" she asked.

Natalya smoothed her frizzy hair back. "Uh, they were great," she said. "Up until about five minutes ago when they caught sight of Octavian, but, you know." She rolled her eyes, then quickly peeked back to make sure he hadn't seen. Luckily for her, he had hightailed it out of there as soon as the dogs took their eyes off him.

"They have excellent judgment," Reyna agreed. Natalya giggled, but then she averted her eyes like laughing was illegal. "I can take them from here." Natalya handed over the two leashes, dropped half a curtsy, and then fled. A curtsy? Maybe Camp Half-Blood had been a little under-hierarchical, but she didn't usually receive curtsies even at home. It was nice to be respected again.

Clicking her tongue, Reyna tugged on the dogs' leashes and walked them toward the praetors' offices. It took a little elbow-maneuvering to open her door, but she finally managed it (she was glad no one was around to see her struggle, though) and bumped the door open with her hip. The dogs darted in and began to bark, so she looked around the corner—Octavian stood by her desk. She suddenly realized that she had gone the entire week without thinking about him once, and that it had been very peaceful. Ah well, back to business as usual.

"Evening, augur," she said coolly. "Mind explaining your presence in my office?"

"How was the party?" he asked, sounding like he'd prefer to throw knives rather than words. "A full week at the  _graecus_  camp—"

"It went very well, thank you," she said. "It was peaceable, and no one broke in to bother me late at night."

He sniffed. "You seem . . . different. More Greek. Polluted after only one week? You'll contaminate the legion."

Daughter of a fully Roman war goddess, more Greek? Right. Zero multiplied by anything is still zero. "Thank you for your input." A dull headache began to throb at the base of her skull.

The skinny boy walked around her to get to the door, skirting away from her growling greyhounds. "I just thought I'd be the first to welcome you back."

She stared him down.

"And to warn you," he said in a falsely casual tone, "that as a Roman who always has the interests of the legion at heart, I'll be keeping a close eye to make sure our . . .  _guests_  don't have undue influence on anyone. Especially on our esteemed leaders." He gave a definitely mocking bow and swept out of her office.

Reyna glared after him for a moment before she pushed the door shut and knelt to pet Aurum and Argentum again. "I'm going to kill him," she said to them in a fake cheery tone. "I'm going to skin all that greasy hair off his head with my own knife."

They wagged their tails like they thought it was a great idea. If only.

* * *

" _You seem more Greek," sneered Octavian, who morphed into Hylla, then Jason, then Bellona, saying the same thing each time. "More Greek. You'll contaminate the legion."_

" _No, I'm not!" Reyna protested, but her hands were bound behind her back and she couldn't reach her blade to defend herself. "I won't!"_

"Graecus _," the others taunted. "Who will tolerate a polluted praetor?"_

" _Reyna," said another voice, farther away._

" _Contaminate the legion."_

" _Reyna," the new voice repeated, sounding closer now. "Reyna, wake up."_

Reyna jumped, jerking into a half-upright position and almost bonking heads with Hazel. For a terrifying moment she thought she was still bound, but then she realized her sheets were just twisted tightly around her, and she took a moment to tug them off so her heart could slow down a little.

The younger girl seemed to want to ask, but she refrained. "The  _Argo_ 's here," she said instead, smiling in an attempt to get her praetor to do the same. Reyna only rubbed her wrists and squinted out the window. The sun was up; she must have missed her alarm somehow. It had been three days since they'd returned—one day for Leo to sail back to Camp Half-Blood, another for him to bring the Greeks here—and the nightmares had only grown worse. Tonight's was actually fairly tame, compared to most, but she was beginning to doubt she'd sleep well again. Octavian's comments had gotten to her worse than she liked to admit. Damn augur.

Reyna turned to get out of bed, but Hazel suggested, "You might want to change," modestly not looking at the praetor's pajamas. Not that they were anything to blush at—a giant black T-shirt with a print of the Coliseum on it (Hylla had sent it to her for Christmas one year, just to spite her with free shipping) and a pair of scarlet men's boxer shorts. Oh, well, okay, maybe those were short enough to merit a little blushing in a thirteen-year-old from the 1940s. Reyna nodded shortly.

"Thank you. I'll be out in five minutes. You're dismissed."

Hazel fled the room just as Reyna realized she had locked the door last night. Grumbling, she stalked to her closet, pulled on a white T-shirt and shorts, and then (bless the gods!) fastened her golden armor and purple cape into place. It was heavy and warm, but it felt safe, familiar, solid. She could handle anything as long as she was dressed for it.

After quickly brushing her hair and teeth, she strode for New Rome as quickly as she could without full-on running, determined to make it there before the Greeks unloaded. She would be there, austere and fully Roman, to welcome them. And to make sure there would be no shenanigans.

Unfortunately, she wasn't quite fast enough. The demigods were coming down into the city when she arrived, seeming much more comfortable after the past week than she thought they would have been otherwise. Already demigods from both camps were catching each other's eyes, waving and hugging and on occasion even fist-bumping. She decided that yes, it had been a good idea to go to Camp Half-Blood first. She would have to commend Chiron for that particular tactic later.

"Queen-face!" A pair of scrawny arms wrapped around her from behind, and reflexively she ducked out of it, yanking the arms across each other and down, and it took her a second to realize she was looking into the face of Leo.

She let him go, frowning. "You shouldn't attack someone from behind like that."

"Do antagonistic strangers usually call you 'queen-face' before they hug you?" Leo countered. "If so, I'm highly offended. I had to work hard to come up with that name. They should at least pay me a tax or something."

The corners of her mouth twitched, but she didn't smile.

"You seem especially grumpy. How long have you been up,  _dulzura_?" he asked suspiciously.

"Don't call me that!" she hissed, glancing around to make sure no one had caught the term of endearment. "It's been . . . a long few days, but nothing I can't handle. I'm fine."

Leo brightened. "Aw, you missed me!" He tried to hug her again, but she held him at arm's length.

"Don't." She dropped her arms so she wouldn't have to touch him.

Stroking his chin, he looked her over and shook his head. "You need hot chocolate," he diagnosed. "Preferably with some coffee snuck in there, too."

"I have to be here."

"Meh, we Greekies can take care of ourselves for an hour. Let's go." He grabbed her by the hand and pulled her toward the smell of coffee wafting from the Via Praetoria, and she didn't have enough willpower to resist more than halfheartedly.

* * *

Reyna had to admit, she did feel better after getting some chocolate into her system. She and Leo sat at a small table off in a corner, where she hoped any coffeeshop-goers might overlook their praetor communing with a camp-bombing Greek. Granted, a camp-bombing Greek who had known to order three big marshmallows in her hot chocolate.

"See, that's better, isn't it?" Leo had already inhaled most of his coffee, so he just leaned on the table and watched her drink.

"Rather." She still regretted missing her 7:00 run, though, but she decided to be gracious and not bring it up.

"So now that you've filled your grumpy quota for the day—"

"You assume I have a limit."

"—can we talk about the kiss?"

Reyna froze. Very carefully, she swallowed her mouthful of hot chocolate, set her cup down on the table, and folded her hands behind it. Leo was looking her right in the eye, serious for once. "What do you want to talk about?" she asked neutrally.

He looked a little hurt, just for a moment. "You act like you wish it hadn't happened."

Her neutrality wavered. "I never said that," she protested.

"You've been all, 'Don't touch me, Leo. Don't call me nicknames, Leo. Don't bring up the fact that we danced and swapped spit, Leo.' What else am I supposed to be getting out of that?"

"It's not that I— _ay_." Rubbing her mouth thoughtfully, Reyna closed her eyes and sighed. "We were both hopped up on adrenaline and a week's worth of late nights. I think we can both agree that it probably wouldn't have happened otherwise."

"Do you wish it hadn't?" he demanded, leaning forward so far his suspenders caught on the wrought-iron table.

"Keep your voice down!" she snapped.

" _Well?_ "

Reyna struggled for words. Eloquent speech was Octavian's arena, not hers. She was only good at scaring people and, apparently, going for all the wrong guys. "It's not that I . . . didn't enjoy it, or that I don't like you. It's just that I have responsibilities here, and I can't jeopardize that with scandalous behavior. Nothing is worth that."

Another time, he might have made a joke about his being a scandal, but right now he was just offended. Refusing to look at her, he tugged his suspenders off the table and snatched up his empty coffee cup.

"I would hate to jeopardize your responsibilities, praetor," he said. "Don't worry. You won't have any more trouble from me."

Leo stood and left. Reyna buried her face in her hands. She had never felt as cold as she did in his absence.


	7. Act Seven: Camp Jupiter

If someone had asked Reyna anytime before she'd visited Camp Half-Blood whether one week could totally screw up her sense of the world, she would have said  _no, of course not, and don't you have anything productive you could be doing?_  But now, she decided her answer had changed:  _yes, it could, and it_ _ **hurt**_ _._

In the course of a one-week diplomatic vacation, she had somehow managed to get used to having at least one person around to talk to, hang around with, share sugar-laden drinks with, and if nothing else, simply be near. Now that she was back at Camp Jupiter and that person was no longer speaking to her, being thrust back into her original stoic solitude felt even worse than it had when she first arrived after Lupa and Circe. The same way that mild hunger pains faded into the background during an extended fast, but returned at crippling full force the moment you put food in your mouth.

Not that she could admit this to anyone. Octavian would have her burned at the stake if he figured it out, Jason was too busy showing his girlfriend around (again) to care, and Leo . . . Leo had taken to actively avoiding her, to the point where if she saw him at all, it was because a mutual friend had forced him to show up there. He was never out-and-out mean . . . just cold. If he addressed her, he called her "praetor" or, once, "Reyna." A hard, unlilted R. She thought she might prefer slander.

The nightmares were getting worse too. If she slept at all at night, it was restless and brief. She had started simply staying up late pretending to work in her office, just to have something to do that didn't involve dreaming. The second night after the Greeks arrived, Jason caught her at it.

"Reyna? What are you still doing up?"

Reyna, who had been slowly sliding closer to the surface of the table, jerked upright, accidentally slapping the papers lying on it. She turned to see Jason standing in the doorway, looking confused, a ream of papers tucked in his arm. She rubbed her eyes. "Evening."

"Uh, morning, technically."

She glanced at the clock—one o'clock on the dot. Oh. Was it really only one? "Morning, then. Can I help you?"

Jason let himself in, the door creaking halfway closed behind him. "I was just going to drop these off for you to read in the morning—I mean, the not-godsforsaken-hours part of the morning. Shouldn't you be resting?"

Ha, ha. Resting. "No, I'm fine."

Jason pulled up a chair and sat down, setting the papers on her desk and looking at her concernedly.  _This must be a late-night part of his personality_ , she theorized. But she didn't really want to deal with Concerned Jason right now; she just wanted to work and not sleep. "Planning and running a week's worth of celebration is a ton of work, Reyna. You're allowed to be tired—and you're allowed to sleep. You're not a robot."

"Contrary to popular opinion."

He eyed her like he wasn't sure whether she was joking or not. Frankly,  _she_  wasn't sure whether she was joking or not, though she was leaning pretty strongly toward not.

"How about this?" he suggested. "If you go on to bed, you can sleep in, and I'll handle the entertainment for tomorrow. You take the day off. Watch a movie, exercise, hang out with friends, punch Octavian, whatever. Preferably sleep would be in there somewhere."

"That's not nec—" she started, but he latched onto the idea.

"It's settled, then. Here, come on, I'll walk you to your villa." He put a hand on her arm and lifted her to her feet.

"No, really," she protested, but he pushed her firmly out the door, closing it behind them. They made their way through the dim lamplight toward the praetors' villas. "Piper would have a fit if she saw you with me so late," she said eventually. Sadly, that was her best attempt at small talk.

"No, she'd understand," Jason reassured her, which was not reassuring at all, given his almost supernatural ability to obliviously misunderstand the female gender. "Hey, listen, we haven't seen you much since we've been here. The Seven, I mean. If you want something to do during your break tomorrow, it might be fun if you joined us for lunch or one of the activities."

"Thanks, but I should really just get caught up on personal stuff," she said immediately, shaking her head.

"Nah, you should definitely come hang out! The girls were asking just earlier where you'd gone off to, and I know you haven't seen Leo, 'cause he's been hiding almost as much as you."

Speaking of being oblivious. "I'm fine," Reyna repeated, clipping off the end of each word. "Thank you."

"Whatever," he gave up. "Oh, here's your place."

"Good night." She was inside, door shut, before he finished echoing her.

* * *

After three hours of fitful sleep, Reyna picked up a dog-eared copy of the Divine Comedy (in the original Italian, which was close enough to Latin that her mild dyslexia wouldn't act up), but after twelve cantos of hell she just felt worse. By then it was six, though, early enough to get up without being murdered by the masses. She took her time dressing, but the ritual was so familiar that even rebraiding her hair didn't take more than three minutes. She left the dogs asleep on the floor and headed for the coffee shop.

The barista didn't question her early start; it was no earlier than the last few mornings. "Two shots of espresso in it today, thanks," Reyna said, and he nodded. In a moment the drink was ready, handed to her steaming with what was probably the freshest coffee ever. Sustenance in hand, she turned to take her usual side table—but it was already taken. Sipping from her own drink, Annabeth was poring over some designs with a pencil and ruler.

"Annabeth?"

The blonde looked up in surprise.

 _Polluted praetor_ , sneered dream Octavian in her head. She tried to ignore it.

"Morning, Reyna," the other girl was saying. "I didn't think anyone else would be up already. I really wanted to get a head start on today's architecture competition—how long do you think it would take to build a dome  _and_ columns leading along a path? Never mind, don't answer that." She scribbled something in the margin of one blueprint and then set her pencil aside. "So how are you?"

Reyna looked at her silently for a moment before she stirred, realizing it required an answer. "Fine," she said, taking a drink of her espresso-contaminated hot chocolate.

_You'll contaminate the legion._

_Shut up_ , she begged the echoes of her nightmares.

Annabeth scrutinized her. "Are you okay?"

"Fine," she repeated.

"Okay." The blonde backed off, but Reyna got the feeling she was still analyzing her, so she and her dirty chocolate wandered away.

The rest of the morning passed in a fog. A long, dragged-out fog, Reyna remembered that at least, but she really couldn't say what she did. She didn't go for a run, even though that would have been nice; Aurum was spurting oil between his neck and back, and Argentum was making mournful clicking noises like he didn't feel too great either. She would have just stayed in with them all afternoon, but when she left at noon to find one of the Vulcan kids who had fixed them in the past, she was unwillingly assimilated into the herds of demigods gravitating toward the mess hall. She wasn't hungry, but trying to get away wasn't worth being trampled. She would just wait it out until an escape route appeared.

Reyna managed to stumble out of the crowd just outside the mess hall. She turned a corner and planned to go right back to the barracks, but she heard a familiar voice. Annabeth again.

"She seems off. Like she's trying to act normal but forgot how. Did you say something to her?"

"Why are things always my fault?" retorted a new voice: Leo. Reyna felt like she'd been kicked. "If the ship runs, it's 'cause Percy can make the sails go poof, but someone breaks and suddenly we blame the mechanic?"

Annabeth was quiet for a long moment. Reyna got the impression she was probably glaring at him. "Fix it," she said finally, in a tone bordering on murderous. "Whatever spat you two had, fix it."

"It wasn't my fault," Leo insisted, and just as Reyna realized they sounded a little louder, the two Greek head counselors came around the corner, almost running into her. A very awkward minute passed in which they all looked at each other and realized what was going on.

"Hello again," Annabeth offered, nudging Leo.

"Praetor," he said.

"Camp bomber," Reyna said. She tried to walk past them, but Annabeth grabbed her by the forearm.

"You should join us for lunch," the blonde suggested, ignoring the homicidal glares coming from both her companions. Then, not waiting for an answer, she gripped Leo by the arm too, and she dragged them both into the mess hall. In an instant she located the rest of the Seven, yanked her hostages toward them, and plopped down, taking them with her.

"Leo and Reyna are going to eat with us today," she said cheerfully. "Won't that be fun?"

Reyna thought the bright red finger marks on their arms suggested otherwise, but the others chorused a bunch of tentative  _yeah_ s and  _sure_ s, probably scared to defy the blonde.

"So Jason was just telling me about your imposed day off." Leaning against the guy in question, Piper smiled at Reyna. "How've you done with it so far?"

Reyna shrugged, feeling blank. "I read a bit," she offered.

"How was your run?" asked Hazel, who had seen her out running plenty in the last year.

"It wasn't," Reyna said. "The dogs aren't well. Spurting oil and stuff."

' _And stuff'?_  Percy mouthed to Annabeth, who elbowed him hard in the gut. Reyna pretended she didn't notice.

"Leo could look at that for you," Jason offered, gesturing to the mechanic.

Reyna stared at him. Was he serious?

"You know, I'm super busy," Leo said, rubbing the back of his neck.

"I'm just going to have a child of Vulcan take care of it," Reyna agreed. "I mean, they already know them, so I'd hate to put anyone out of their way—"

Jason waved this away. "Aw, those Vulcan kids are terrified of your dogs. That one girl, Callie, still has stitches from that time Aurum bit her on the hand. You have to admit Leo's got the best chance of coming away unharmed."

Hazel and Frank nodded in embarrassed agreement. Reyna and Leo looked at each other unwillingly, both (or at least Reyna) struggling to maintain a neutral expression.

"I guess I could have a look," Leo managed finally, attempting his normal, carefree tone. It came out more like he had just smelled something dead. No one called him on it; Reyna wondered if they actually hadn't noticed or, more likely, they just didn't want to make things worse.

"Oh, look," Piper said in fake excitement. "Food."

* * *

After much too long a lunch of forced socializing, Reyna ducked out of the mess hall, Leo straggling several feet behind her. She considered ordering him to hurry up, but decided against it. It was the most awkward, deliberately dead silent ten-minute walk of her life. When they finally reached her villa, it was almost a relief to show him in.

That was before she looked around.

"Oh my gods," she gasped, whirling to find her dogs. There was oil everywhere—streaked on the carpet, smeared across the couch, even spattered on her television. A whining Aurum was crumpled in a corner of the kitchen, oil pooling on the tile underneath him, and his silver brother was huddled under the cabinets. Reyna dropped to her knees to try to assess the damage to her pets.

"It wasn't this bad before," she mumbled, sticking her fingers into the oily gaps. Without thinking, she turned to look up at Leo. "What's  _wrong_  with them?"

Looking unnerved by her anxiety, he stepped onto the tile and knelt beside her, one hand going to his tool belt. He looked the gold greyhound over analytically; Reyna could practically see his brain switch into Repair mode. She backed off and let him take over, listening to but failing to decipher his engineer-y mutterings.

It hurt, this repair job. She shouldn't have let the others talk her into it, even though they were right about Leo's skill. Watching him work felt too much like her time at Camp Half-Blood, back when things were simpler and easier and warmer. In just the past few days, the cold aloneness was killing her. It wasn't even solitude; solitude could be enjoyable. This was miserable, lonely aloneness.

" . . . that you recall?"

Reyna hadn't realized Leo was talking. "Sorry?"

"I asked if you knew of anything weird that could have gotten in their systems." He kept his eyes on the dog. "Food, plants, anything."

She shrugged, rubbing her eyes. "Dunno. They might have rolled in something during a run."

"Hmm. I'll have to take out their control panels and dig around." He went back to tinkering. Even in the fluorescent light, she noticed the gleam of oil smeared in his curls, admired the care and concentration on his face as he worked to fix the only family she had out here. She decided she was done pretending.

 _Graecus_ , taunted dream Octavian, but Reyna was already headed for the counter. Pulling cocoa powder from the top cabinet and milk from the fridge, she filled up two big china mugs and stuck them in the microwave for three minutes. They came out good and frothy, so she dropped a few marshmallows on top and poured her good jelly beans into a bowl beside them.

Leo rocked back on his heels, wielding a screwdriver and muttering to himself about wire connections.

Reyna cleared her throat.

Leo kept right on working.

Reyna cleared her throat again, louder. And then she actually said, "A- _hem_."

Leo looked up then, guardedly.

"Whenever you're done," she said, trying not to mumble even though the temptation was overwhelming, "can we talk? I made hot chocolate," she hurried to add.

"Um," he said, rolling his jaw like a machine figuring out its own workings. "Sure."

"Okay," she said, and she sat down by Argentum to wait, pulling a blue pen from her pocket to write on her left palm in the meantime.

Finally Leo got up, washed his hands in the kitchen sink, and declared Aurum repaired. Reyna got up so she could sit down on a stool at the bar, at which point she pulled the mugs and candy toward herself and motioned for him to come sit next to her. He sat down warily. She passed him one of the mugs and set the bowl on the counter between them.

"I don't want your pity jelly beans," he said. He was trying to sound unflinching and cold, but he wavered, uncertain.

"They're there if you change your mind," she said, taking some herself to steady her nerves.

He did take a sip from his mug, though, which she thought was a good sign.

Reyna took a deep breath and glanced at the notes penned on the palm of her left hand.  _1\. Apologize._ All right. First time for everything. Leo was fidgeting with his miniature automaton again.

"I'm sorry that I offended you," she said, staring into her marshmallows. "I didn't mean to, I just—Words don't work very well for me. Octavian makes the eloquent speeches. I  _do_  things, make things happen. Whenever I try to say anything—" She waved her hand in the air, mimicking an explosion. "—bad things happen."

"I believe that," Leo admitted. "But whatever your level of speaking ability, I mean, you made it pretty clear that you weren't interested. Which is, you know, normal for me, I'm used to it, but . . ."

Reyna looked at her palm again.  _2\. Explain_. "It wasn't that. What I had been trying to get at was . . ." She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to string words together. "I didn't think I could handle spending so much time with you, on top of my work. And if anyone saw me slacking off, with a Greek no less, there are some that would have my neck for it."  _Some_  being Octavian. She shook her head, then checked her notes again. Leo caught the motion this time. He reached out and flipped her hand over, revealing the blue ink.

"Notes?" he asked incredulously.

"Talking points," she clarified. "So I don't forget anything."

The corners of his lips twitched like he was trying not to smile. Looking over the list, he mouthed the words to himself. "Number three is 'how now.' What does that mean?" he asked.

Reyna tried to pull her hand back, but he held onto it. "I was leading into that. Like I said, I thought it wouldn't work, but it turns out the exact opposite is true. Everything seems worse since we argued. I'm getting almost no work done, I can't concentrate, I'm hardly sleeping, and I'm  _miserable_. And . . . I think you are too." Finally looking up at him, she scrutinized his expression, hoping to see something like openness or forgiveness, or at least not hurt and anger.

Leo looked down the list. "Four, 'offer to retry conversation.' What conversation?"

"At the café," she said, her free hand worrying at the edge of her cape at her shoulder. Her stomach was roiling; she was so nervous she felt physically sick, but hell if she was going to back down now. "You wanted to talk about the kiss, and I asked what part you wanted to talk about, and you said—"

"Do you wish it hadn't happened?" Leo said.

"And I never actually answered the question."

He took a shaky breath. "Well?"

"I like you," Reyna blurted, leaning toward him. "I like you a  _lot_."

Leo's hair burst into flames. "Really?"

"And I liked kissing you a lot too," she continued all in a rush, her cheeks hot. "Esp—especially when you catch on fire."

"Holy Hephaestus," he muttered. His expression was a strange mixture of confusion and excitement. "Wait," he said, tapping his index fingers together rapidly as he sorted this new information out, "so I could kiss you right now, and you wouldn't—?"

"Hang on! I didn't get to say number five yet!" Reyna cried, looking down at the last item on the list on her palm. She had made a list of talking points, and by the gods, she was going to hit them all.

"If it's 'friend zone Leo,' I'm taking your dogs hostage," he warned.

She cracked a smile and read the last item aloud. "Number five: if positive"—she took one look at his flaming hair and shrugged as in  _yes, probably positive_ —"offer closed doors."

"What's it mean?"

"It means I still have to be a respectable praetor," she explained. "But . . . if you'd be okay with keeping everything private, maybe we could work it out."

"Private meaning . . .?"

"Meaning no PDA when we're around other people. Getting coffee is okay, but otherwise no dates outside of your workshop or my villa. No hugging, no nicknames,  _definitely_  no kissing in public. But if no one's around, fair game."

The light sparked in Leo's eyes, literally. "'Offer closed doors,' as in  _behind_  closed doors. Got it." He nodded sagely.

"So would that be ok—?"

"Yes!"

Feeling warm again for the first time in days, Reyna smiled at Leo. He grinned back, at full blinding force.

Then she looked back at the rest of her oil-spattered villa. "I really need to clean this up."

"I'll get the cornstarch,  _mi reina_."


	8. Act Eight: Camp Jupiter

"If you didn't want me to like you,  _querida_ , you shouldn't have threatened me."

Leo and Reyna lounged on her freshly cleaned, low Roman couch. He leaned sideways on one end and she on the other, with her feet crossed over his in the middle and mugs of candy-laden ice cream in their hands. Aurum and Argentum lay on the carpet beside them—clean, quiet, and thankfully not gushing oil all over creation—and their tails thumped whenever Leo spoke.

" _Increíble_ ," Reyna said, rolling her eyes and pointing toward him with her spoon. "Only you could take an honest-to-gods death threat and turn it into a come-on."

He shrugged indefatigably. "What can I say? I'm a sucker for a strong, beautiful woman who gets up close and personal to kill me." Nudging her foot with his, he grinned at her. She pursed her lips and nudged him back and took another bite of ice cream.

"Oh, hey," she said suddenly through the mouthful, clapping her hand over her mouth as she tried not to choke. Eventually she managed it. "I was wondering, where did you learn to dance salsa? Last Friday you seemed . . . reasonably in practice."

Leo's grin widened. "Why yes, I  _am_  a fabulous dancer. Thank you, Rey-Rey."

Reyna flicked a chunk of Snickers at his forehead. It made a dull  _thunk_  as it hit its target spot-on. "Answer the question, lowly mortal."

For some reason, his smile shrunk by a few teeth. "My mom taught me some when I was little. Long afternoons in the machine shop, you know. The rest I picked up from different  _casas de acogida_."

Foster homes. She sucked ice cream off her spoon, slow and regretful. She hadn't meant to bring up bad memories.  _Sorry_  couldn't be an appropriate response, but she wasn't sure how to maneuver out of that particular topic.

But he did, out of experience, and he changed the subject quickly: "What about you, miss 'Romans don't dance'? Seemed pretty dancey to me."

"Romans  _don't_  dance, usually. Not in public." She wasn't sure how much Percy had told him about her, so she went with the minimum information. "But I grew up working for Circe, who thought it was a good practice to keep up. I can't say I disagree."

"Me either," he agreed, waggling his eyebrows. She considered throwing another piece of candy at him, but decided it would just be a waste. She shoveled a pile of gummy bears into her open mouth, right before he reached over and snatched the cup away. Staring at her now-empty hand, it took her a moment to fully process what had just happened.

Finally she looked up, in time to see him taking a leisurely bite of her snack. "I highly recommend you give that back," she said, holding out her hand.

Leo dug out another spoonful, but he didn't eat it. "Open up," he ordered with a grin.

Reyna stared at him, unimpressed. "Are you serious? No."

"Come on," he wheedled, waving the spoonful of candy and ice cream in front of her face. "It'll be a good experience for you."

"No, it won't."

"You have control issues."

"Maybe I— _ACK!_ " Leo had shoved the spoonful into her mouth at the first opportunity, and now she was coughing hard, her hand in front of her mouth. "Leo, I'm going to—" More coughing cut her off. She felt like a cat trying to hack up a hairball. Not the most flattering image to come to mind. Finally, though, the ice cream went down, and she was glad to find she was still alive. "Ugh. I'm going to  _kill you_."

"Promise?" He grinned cheekily, the tips of his curls starting to spark.

Damn his strange fetish for death threats. Flushing, she narrowed her eyes and leaned forward to steal  _his_  ice cream (fair was fair), but he anticipated the movement. He met her as she came, pressing his mouth to hers, warm as always. A strange juxtaposition, since this time he tasted freshly of vanilla ice cream. "Cheating," she mumbled, but without thinking about it, she scooted a little closer.

Then someone pounded on the door. Reyna broke away and scrambled backward, running her hand over her hopefully-still-pristine braid and praying she wasn't totally red in the face. "Come in," she called, her voice a little high-pitched as she pulled her feet away from Leo's and they both turned to sit the proper way on the couch. Leo looked disappointed.

The door opened, and Dakota stuck his head in. "Annabeth told me to tell you," he began, but then he had to pause and remember what it was. "Oh, wait, yeah. To tell you that if you guys don't show up at the architecture competition to cheer our group on, she was going to . . . something." He hiccupped and chugged from a canteen of what was presumably over-sugared Kool-Aid.

Reyna glanced at the clock on the wall. Ten til four—where had the time gone? Jumping off the couch, she shoved the last of her candy/ice cream into her mouth, dropped the mug and spoon into the sink, and pulled on her shoes. "Let's go, Valdez, we're going to be late."

Leo pushed himself to his feet, in much less of a rush than she was. "The praetor is never late," he declared. "Everyone else is simply early."

She rolled her eyes and motioned sharply with two fingers for him and Dakota to follow her out. They did, like puppies. Or ducklings. Two little male demigod ducklings, with lava blood and a drinking problem, respectively.

Jason had chosen to host the architecture competition in the Field of Mars, since it was already used to being built and dismantled on. Groups who signed up were allotted a segment of land to build on, the only rules being against sabotage and overly small models. Reyna hadn't overseen any of it, so she wasn't sure what to expect—not that she didn't trust Jason, she just didn't trust  _anyone_ —but as she approached, she saw that high walls had been thrown up between the groups' segments. She immediately appreciated whoever had thought of that; it would minimize cheating, prolong anticipation, and provide a clearer path for judges and spectators.

Out of the flocks of people around the field, Annabeth came running up to meet the three of them, ink and plaster smeared on her cheek, a pencil stuck in her ponytail. "Oh, good, you're here," she said, sounding distracted. "The judges are inside right now. They've been in for—" She checked her watch. "—seven minutes and forty seconds, and I'm not sure how much longer we have until we hear the results."

"Probably a while," Reyna said.

The blonde rocked on the balls of her feet. "Gods, I'm dying. You all should come wait with us." She pointed to a group of demigods, the rest of the Seven, lying in the shade. So Reyna, Leo, and Dakota followed her over, and Reyna at least was grateful for the twenty-degree temperature drop when they hit the grass. The son of Bacchus stayed with them, and since no one looked at him askance, Reyna guessed that he had been with them before being sent to retrieve her and Repair Boy.

"How are the dogs?" Percy asked.

"Better now, thanks," Reyna replied.

"Thanks to the best mechanic on the face of the earth," Leo teased, poking her in the side. She shot him a  _don't you dare, we talked about this_  look. He got a gleam in his eyes that she didn't trust.

"Well, that's good," Hazel said, rolling onto her stomach to smile tentatively up at her praetor, but she was distracted by Leo's rolling away to the other side of the group.

"Stay over there!" he cried at Reyna, looking away from her in mock terror.

"I was planning on it," she replied flatly.

"She's scary," he confided to Piper. "And I'm pretty sure she still wants to kill me. She said so earlier."

"Can you blame her?" Piper teased him. He flopped onto the ground like he'd been mortally wounded. Reyna pursed her lips and looked back to Annabeth, who was staring at the competition exit while Percy drew marine animals on the back of her ratty T-shirt with an non-sword ballpoint pen.

"Who built with you?" she asked the blonde.

"Frank, Hazel, Dakota, and I were Team XVI."

"Meaning she designed everything and let the Romans do most of the actual building," Hazel teased. Frank laughed but quickly sobered up, glancing nervously in Annabeth's direction.

Luckily for them, that was when the judges came out, hands empty of awards, still writing on their boards but now letting the crowds enter the competition walls. Annabeth jumped to her feet, pulling Percy with her and motioning with her free hand for everyone to follow her as she headed in. Everyone did, though Dakota fell behind to talk to Gwen when they passed her team.

There were twenty teams in all, so twenty exhibits. Reyna wanted to appreciate them, really she did, but she wasn't architecturally inclined and she was distracted by the fool of a mechanic dancing along at the edge of their group.

"If Reyna comes at me, I'm going to hide behind you," Leo warned Jason, who looked at him strangely.

"My final wish is for you to turn into a dragon at my funeral," Leo said to Frank, who rolled his eyes and walked a little faster.

Leo, in fact, spent so much time (fifteen exhibits' worth) being fearful of and separate from Reyna that she almost didn't notice when he sneaked back near her.  _Almost_  in that as she was following the rest under Team XV's triumph arch, she jumped when she felt someone touch the small of her back, and when she spun to see who it was, it was her dogs' favorite mechanic, standing a little too close.

"Was I convincing?" he asked brightly, lacing his fingers between hers.

"I've seen more convincing dead animals," she said, pushing him away. He laughed and rolled with the motion, not thrown off at all. "Seriously, don't.  _Subtlety_."

"Okay," he said agreeably. "I will not subtlety."

"Leo!" She pushed him through the triumph, gritting her teeth because she couldn't deny a tiny part of her liked his obstinacy.

That is, until she met the eyes of Octavian, who was already in exhibit sixteen and looking at her with a mix of disgust and smugness, like he'd caught her doing exactly the awful thing he'd suspected her of and oh boy, did he have her now. The Seven didn't catch it; they were too busy praising Annabeth's design, Frank's/Hazel's/absent Dakota's construction, and the first-place prize it had all been awarded.

The augur walked past Reyna—almost glided, he seemed so pleased with himself. At the closest possible moment, he leaned down and said in an undertone, "Good to see our  _esteemed_  praetor holds her position in such priority," with a deliberate look at her Greek companions, his gaze lingering on Leo. She was stone-faced, allowing him nothing. He glanced meaningfully down at the slick dirt she was standing in, and then he was gone.

Reyna tried to shake the mud off her shoes, but it was hard to get rid of the nausea that had wrapped around her middle.

* * *

After dinner, Reyna and Leo went up into the  _Argo II_ , where he showed her around (she'd already sailed on it twice, but this was the VIP tour, and she didn't have any campers to deal with this time), concluding with his workshop alongside the engine room. Leo flopped onto the floor in the corner by a box built into the wall, and Reyna set herself down carefully across from him, resting her back against the leg of a stationary table. He set his hand against the wall box until something inside it clicked, and then he opened it and pulled out a water bottle and a king-size Twix for each of them.

"We have anything going on tomorrow?" he asked before unwrapping his candy bar and shoving half of it into his face.

She took more measured bites; it lasted longer that way. "Outdoor things mostly—war games, picnic at the lake. But the weather might go either way, so we'll see what the masses want to do if it rains."

"You didn't make the weather nice?"

"Sorry, I left my weather-controlling powers on Long Island."

He shook his head and laughed, curls gleaming in the low light. "You know we Greekies  _can_  actually—?"

"Please stop referring to yourselves like that." Reyna frowned at him over the opening of her water bottle, her head pounding at the memory of Octavian's eyes on her as she pushed Leo away under the triumph.

Sensing tension, Leo carefully matched the soles of his feet up with hers, his left on her right and his right on her left. "You don't like that I'm a Greek,  _querida_?" The corners of his mouth tilted upward, amused and teasing, but the crease in his brow suggested otherwise.

"I don't have a problem with it," she said, trying to focus on the pleasant pressure of his feet against hers. "Some people are still getting used to the idea of Greco-Roman  _alegría_."

"Again with the 'some people.' Who are these guys, and why are they so against us? Other than a few minor battles and bombings and stuff." He didn't specify whether he meant  _Greeks and Romans_  us, or  _Leo and Reyna_  us. She took it as both.

"He's a jerk and an idiot," she said simply, her tone hard. But he still looked like he wanted to disassemble someone, so she gestured to the photographs strung up on the wall next to his snack box. "Who are those?" She couldn't see the faces very well from where she was sitting.

Looking up, Leo reached up and tugged them off the string, their clothespins jittering as they recovered from the lost weight. He shuffled them and looked them over. The first he held out: "You know these crazies." Indeed she did. Piper and Jason were grinning at the camera in front of the actual Roman Coliseum, their arms draped around each other like old friends. He set that one down and held up two more: "These ones too." Percy and Annabeth looking up, surprised, from an illicit coffee date. Piper and Jason again, this time pretending not to snuggle as they stood a little too close on the  _Argo_  deck. He held up one of Festus, full-bodied with wings, much more impressive than he was now as a masthead. He set that one down quickly.

"You have a lot of friends," Reyna said, quiet, trying to ignore the slight twist in her gut. She had no such collection.

Leo swigged from his water like he wanted to avoid talking about it. "A lot of people tolerate me," he finally granted.

He didn't say anything else, but Reyna noticed there was still one photo he hadn't shown her. "Can I see that one?"

It took him a second, but eventually he flipped it front-side up and held it out for her to look at. A much older photo, by the quality, but obviously long treasured. The snapshot captured a pretty Hispanic woman, possibly in her thirties but youthful, her curly black hair tied back but coming loose. She was cuddling with a young boy who looked just like her, obviously her son. Both their hands were black with grease, but they were grinning and laughing, having the time of their life next to a broken-down car.

But Leo had mentioned foster homes. "Is that . . . your mom?" she asked tentatively.

He nodded, not speaking.

She decided not to ask why this was the only photo he appeared in. "She's beautiful," she said. "You both look really happy." It hurt just to look at it. What loss.

He nodded again and looked away, under the pretext of pinning the photos back onto their line. She herself looked back to her Twix. There had to be a socially acceptable way of moving back into Non-Painful Territory. She gave it her best shot and said the first thing that rolled off her tongue:

"So do you actually have lava for blood, or are you just naturally hot?"

Oh  _gods_. The blood drained from her face as her brain caught up with her mouth. She stuck the entire rest of her Twix in her face to keep herself from trying to say anything else.

Leo turned around slowly, eyeing her. He cocked his head as he asked, "Did you just . . .?" She choked on her candy, and he began to laugh, his shoulders shaking and everything.

"That was really bad," Reyna said once she could breathe again. "Disrespectful. I'm sorry."

He shook his head no, the laughing smile still on his face. "That is one of the best come-ons I've ever heard," he said, "and possibly the first one aimed at me, if accidentally. Thank you for that."

She made a face.

"And to answer the question, no, I have normal person blood, though I will admit that I  _am_  remarkably hot."

Well, at least he was right back to normal. And she wasn't feeling too bad herself anymore, save for a bruised ego.


	9. Act Nine: Camp Jupiter

A few hours after the sun had gone down, Leo and Reyna sneaked back off the  _Argo II_  and made their way through the dimly lit back-alley equivalent of the Principia. Fortunately no one was around, because they had fallen back into Cheesy Pickup Lines mode. "Do you have a Band-Aid?" Leo asked, pretending to wince. "I just scraped my knee falling for you."

Reyna smirked. "You must be a hell of a thief because you stole my heart from across the room."

"Kiss me if I'm wrong, but dinosaurs still exist, right?"

"Is it hot in here, or is it just you?"

He held out his hand. "Can I borrow your cell phone? I need to call animal control, 'cause I'm looking at a  _fox_."

"Hello, I'm doing a survey of what people think are the cheesiest pickup lines," she offered. "So, do you pick 'Do you come here often?', 'What's your sign?', or 'Hello, I'm doing a survey of what people think are the cheesiest pickup lines'?"

"You know what my shirt is made of?" Leo asked. "Boyfriend material."

She held her hand over her mouth to smother her laughter before she returned, "Are you a beaver? 'Cause  _dam!_ "

He laughed. "You better call Life Alert. I've fallen for you and I can't get up."

"Was your godly father a mechanic? That explains your finely tuned body."

"I see what you did there." Leo broke the pattern momentarily to grin in approval. Then he came back with "Do you have any raisins? How about a date?"

Smiling, she bit her lip and looked forward. They were approaching her villa. "Oh, here's me."

The last few steps seemed unduly short. "Bedtime for Bonzo?" Leo asked, which she neither understood nor asked about, as they stalled outside her door.

"Nah, I haven't been sleeping much lately. I'll probably work or something."

"I think you're still grounded, actually."

Reyna pursed her lips, unable to argue since it wasn't midnight yet. She wasn't certain what the acceptable secret-dating etiquette was here (did the villa doorway count as public or private?), but eventually she just let him come in for a minute. She went to her room to change out of her armor and into her XXL SPQR shirt and pajama shorts, and when she came back out with her hairbrush, he was still waiting on the couch in the living room, the dogs hanging their heads in his lap to be petted.

"What are you still doing here?" she asked, pulling a blanket off the back and sitting down on the far left end where she'd been earlier.

"Well," he began with a sneaky, smoldering sideways glance, "it's late, we're here alone—"

"I sincerely hope you're joking."

Leo grinned, though the flame flickering at the top of his head suggested he might have been interested. "A little birdy told me you haven't been sleeping much lately,  _reina_. I thought I could at least keep you company while you avoid the blissful shores of serenity."

Eyeing him suspiciously, Reyna settled into her corner and smoothed the blanket over her legs. "It'll be boring. And long."

"Probably." He cocked his head. "Why haven't you been sleeping?"

Names called. Mud slung. Mobs. Roman executions. Polluted praetor.  _Graecus_. Her expression hardened. "No reason." Topic change: "What do you propose we do?"

He looked her in the eye, deliberately, and he must have seen something he recognized, because his own expression softened.

"You have any coffee?" he asked, as if that was the prerequisite to anything. She tossed a hand in the direction of the kitchen, where an unused coffeemaker sat in the corner, left by a prior praetor. He hopped up, disrupting the dogs, and headed over to make some of his favorite hot beverage. After a few minutes, the smell of coffee had stained the air, and he returned with two full mugs. He passed her one: hot chocolate with three marshmallows on top. It didn't smell like coffee, even though she suspected he'd sneaked a little in to help her stay awake.

She took a sip, then a longer draught. Perfect. "Thanks."

"Don't drink it all at once," he protested as he downed a fourth of his coffee in one go. "Also, I improved your coffeemaker."

"I didn't know it was in need of improving."

"Oh, yeah, it definitely was. But not to worry, it works like a dream now." He pretended to sweep her a gallant bow from his side of the couch. She granted him a sarcastic smile. "Let's see, how to entertain the queen," he went back to the topic at hand, tapping his chin. "You have any movies we can watch?"

Reyna shrugged and pushed herself to her feet so she could walk over to the television. She pulled out from under it a plastic box of DVD cases, most of them Amazon rejects sent from Hylla for one reason or another (usually a mistake in packaging). Leo got up and came to crouch beside her as she lifted the lid off.

" _Dios mio, reina_ ," he whistled, running his fingers over the spines of the cases. "I didn't realize you were such a movie buff for . . ." He picked up a few random movies. " _Mulan_ ,  _300_ , and  _Corazon de Oro_?" He gave her a strange look, smiling and wrinkling up his nose. "You have wide-ranging tastes."

"I have never watched that telenovela in my life," Reyna lied. "Hylla sends me all sorts of junk. I hate to throw perfectly usable things away."

"Right." He popped the first disc out, breathed on the back, and rubbed it on his shirt to shine it up. "Let's watch this. I've had enough war for a little while, I think."

She shrugged in agreement (Bellona help her) and started it up. When the menu came onto the screen, with protagonists Carmen and Matteo staring deeply into each other's eyes as tense music warbled, she settled back onto the couch. Leo assembled his own remote and selected  _play all_.

Unfortunately, Reyna had already seen this disc's episodes, and the hot chocolate set in warm and cozy, and Leo's legs were warm behind her back, and all the missed hours of sleep seemed to collect and pile onto her. As the recently unemployed Carmen found comfort in wealthy Matteo's employment offer, Reyna's eyes drifted shut.

_Immediately she found herself in the Field of Mars, on her knees in the mud with her hands tied behind her back. Always tied back, because in her heart she couldn't stand disability in herself. Her armor was gone; she wore only a thin white T-shirt and jeans. The sky was sunny and clear, but throngs of stormy-faced Romans was clamoring around her, yelling and shaking their fists and pulling out their Imperial gold weapons. Octavian stood at the head of the riled-up mob, reading smugly from an official-looking order._

" _Reyna," he declared, "you have been found guilty of treason, fraternizing with enemy Greeks." The Romans,_ her _Romans, stomped and shouted angrily. "You are actually in a romantic relationship with one of them. Do you deny it?"_

_Oh gods. She knew where this was going. She thought she was going to throw up. "No, but—"_

" _You see? She admits to it all! Dishonorable!" Octavian shouted to the mob, whipping them into even more of a frenzy. "Reyna, you are hereby stripped of your position as praetor and sentenced to death."_

_Death. She tried to stand, only to be shoved back to her knees by a soldier standing behind her. "You don't understand!" she shouted. "I can expl—" But the soldier pulled a gag through her mouth and tied it together behind her head, the knot catching and pulling on her hair._

_Jason—_ Jason? _—handed Octavian a sword, the Imperial gold gleaming in the sun, and the augur stepped forward with a self-satisfied smile. Reyna tried to talk around her gag, to no avail. She looked around the mob for someone, anyone, who would stand for her. Where was Leo? Where were the rest of the Seven?_

_The soldier shoved her head forward, forcing her to bow over the mud. Whether intentionally or not, when Octavian stopped in front of her, he kicked up a little mud that spattered on the side of her face._

_Octavian raised the sword over her neck and swung downward._

"Reyna!" Leo's voice jerked her awake, her chest heaving as she tried to catch her breath. Her eyes stung, so she swiped her hand across her cheeks; they were sticky and wet with tears. An anxious Leo leaned toward her, his hands on her shoulders like he'd been shaking her. "Holy Hephaestus, Reyna."

"I'm fine," she said, hoping if he believed it so would she. "I'm going to be fine."

Looking more serious than she often saw him, Leo wrapped his arms around her, rocking just a little, holding her tight and warm. She pressed her face into his shoulder and fisted her hands in his shirt, the closest she could come to returning the hug. Accepting his comfort felt a lot like being face-down in the mud with her hands tied, but for the moment she needed it.

Once Reyna's heart and lungs had calmed down, Leo leaned back against the couch, and Reyna moved with him, her back against his scrawny, lava-blooded chest. He began to trace abstract shapes along her arms. "I used to have nightmares too," he said quietly. "For years I was afraid to go to sleep because I knew what I was going to see. The same terrible dream, night after night."

"What about?" she asked, knowing it wasn't her business.

"My mom died when I was eight."

The beautiful woman with him in the old photograph. Reyna was facing away from him, and she didn't turn around to see the expression on his face. He deserved that much privacy.

"In a fire. It was . . . For a long time I thought it was my fault. It was Gaea, but she used me." His voice cracked. Without turning to look at him, she reached back and touched his hand where it was resting on her arm.

"When I was younger, after Percy and Annabeth destroyed my home on Circe's island, I had nightmares for months," she admitted. "They had let pirates loose, angry lawless reprobates, and I was  _so_  young. Even as a daughter of Bellona I didn't pick up defense quite as quickly as my older sister. The pirates . . . they noticed things like that. They took advantage." Her stomach turned, and she went into no more detail. He was the first she'd ever told, even in such a roundabout way. Even Hylla thought she had been fine during that dark time.

This time it was Leo who took her hand and hung his head over her shoulder, his curls tickling her cheek. They were silent for a long time, just sharing body heat and thinking.

"We're a mess," Leo finally said, chuckling so quietly it was more like a hiccup of air than real laughter.

Reyna smiled faintly, sadly. "A big one."

He picked her hairbrush up from off the floor; she'd forgotten she brought it in. "Your braid got a little messed up while you were sleeping," he said, offering it to her. She took it and began to unravel her braid, letting the waves fall over her other shoulder so he would stay close.

They stayed up the rest of the night, talking and joking. He never let her fall asleep again, even when they were both swaying in their seats and saying nothing at all, and she appreciated it.


	10. Act Ten: Camp Jupiter

Reyna was the first to admit her memory could get a little spotty when she went long periods without sleep. She didn't expect to forget most of the early hours of the morning, though that was precisely what happened. She "woke" back up around eight, with a cup of coffeed-up hot chocolate in her hands (the taste was in her mouth, yuck) and the sound of rain battering the windows of her villa. Leo was up scrounging for food in the kitchen.

"Morning," he yawned as he stretched to reach a loaf of bread from the top cabinet. "It's raining."

"You don't say." Her shirt had fallen over her shoulder; she tugged it up (maybe he hadn't seen her bright blue bra strap) and pushed herself to her feet. "Have we had breakfast?"

"Not yet," he said as the loaf fell onto his face. He caught it as it bounced off. "You like toast?"

She shrugged, running her hand through her hair, and slumped onto a bar stool. It had been, what, five days of little-to-no sleep? Way too long. She watched him tinker with the toaster but couldn't muster the energy to say anything.

Not five minutes later, he handed her a stack of toast on a paper towel—a less formal morning meal than she usually had. But if she didn't have to make it, she wasn't going to complain. He sat down next to her, and they dug in.

Reyna had a bite and a half's worth of toast in her mouth when someone knocked on the door. She motioned for Leo to go get it—then she thought better of it. "Hi," she garbled through the toast, meaning  _hide_ , and he obediently ducked behind the couch. Flailing off the stool, she struggled to chew and swallow before she made it to the door. She swiped her fingers across her lips, just in case there were any toast crumbs still on her face.

Her hand was on the doorknob, but it opened on its own. Dripping on the doorstep in the rain stood Percy and Annabeth, looking unhappy to be awake.

"What is this nonsense?" Percy asked, pointing to the sky.

"Weather," Reyna said.

"You couldn't reschedule the monster rainstorm until after the celebration?"

"Why does everyone assume I can control the weather?" she sighed. "No. The rain will leave eventually. We can work around it in the meantime."

Annabeth cocked her head thoughtfully. "The war games might be more interesting in the rain," she offered.

Percy gave her a sour look. Apparently mister  _son of the sea god_  didn't care for normal precipitation. Not very Roman of him to show it.

It occurred to her, looking at the two of them standing at her door, that Percy was a Greek praetor. And Jason, who was now maybe half-Roman at best, was dating Piper. She wondered if Octavian had failed to notice—or, more likely, he was saving them as evidence when he argued for her execution.

Percy was saying something, and she'd missed it completely. "Sorry?"

"People are a little restless, and the Greeks aren't sure whether everything will still go all right today," he repeated. "So you might want to come address the situation."

"You might want to get dressed first," Annabeth said, suppressing a smile.

Reyna had forgotten she was in her pajamas. "I'll be there in ten minutes," she promised, then all but shut the door in their faces.

Getting ready actually turned out to take twenty minutes, but that was Leo's fault. She kept trying to dress and tidy up, and he kept trying to kiss her.

Finally Reyna arrived in the mess hall, where most of the campers had gathered to get out of the rain. (They had also noticed it was breakfast time, so food was flying everywhere.) Heads turned toward her as she strode through the door, looking fabulous in her armor despite her exhaustion. She didn't let it show. Still, dealing with hundreds of tired, confused, and very damp demigods was not how she'd hoped to start the day.

"Good morning," she said, and immediately the mess hall went silent. Even the  _auras_  stopped delivering food. In the middle of the distraction, Leo sneaked in through the side door and went around the back. He made a face at her from by the wall. She blinked a few times instead of smiling. "I understand there is some confusion as to the storm."

Murmuring rippled through the crowd. Someone called out, "Well, make it go away."

"Yes, I realize it must be nice to live at Camp Half-Blood where the sun always shines," Reyna said, her tone stiff, "but here at Camp Jupiter we like to think that bad weather builds character. We will postpone the picnic until tomorrow, but the war games will go on as planned."

The volume of conversation skyrocketed. She waited. Eventually they realized she had something else to say, and it quieted to a loud whisper.

"I had planned for Siege today and Deathball tomorrow, and we will keep to that schedule. Praetors Jason and Percy are in charge of assigning cohorts and cabins to teams. Once they do that, the defending team may begin to prepare their fortress. The game will start on the Field of Mars at 3:00 sharp."

"Be there or be square," Percy joked.

She glared at him. Then the noise levels went back up, but she was done  _addressing the situation_ , so she sat down to pretend she hadn't already eaten breakfast.

* * *

When three o'clock rolled around, the weather had cleared up a little: the rain had lessened from a constant torrential downpour to being more like unreliably broken faucets that sprayed high-pressure water all over creation every so often. The waterlogged clouds covered the sky in blues so dark they seemed almost black, but the lightning had for the most part ceased, so Reyna figured they were safe to be out with the weaponry.

Of course, safety wasn't the main issue in the rest of the camp. Her real task was getting the last few stragglers to either join the game or at least contribute support as spectators. One of those stragglers, at least, would be easy to convince; she knew he had a soft spot for her.

"I'm gonna go work," Leo said, jerking a thumb toward his ship.

Reyna gave him a firmly negative look. "Don't even think about it. I have to referee this thing, the least you can do is participate."

" _You're_  the one who set it up."

"In the spirit of inter-camp cooperation. Which we won't be getting if  _all_  the Greek head counselors don't play."

He pretended to grumble. "Oh, sure, bring  _that_  up."

She looked over the team divisions. On Team I she could see Jason and Piper, and on Team II Octavian was sending dirty looks toward the rest of the Seven. Best to separate the two young men as much as possible. "Go join Team I," she instructed Leo. "You'll be fine." She wasn't above taking him aside and swapping spit to get him to do it, but she hoped to avoid that, as it would probably end up taking longer than she meant for it to, which would throw her whole schedule off.

He hung around. Eventually she cracked a small smile, and she took and pressed his hand in a lingering, intimate handshake. "I'll see you after the game," she promised. "Go on."

Grinning in return, he went. She watched his back, a faint smile still tugging at the corners of her lips, until he'd disappeared into the crowd.

* * *

The game went long, probably because there were so many people playing. But it seemed to be a clean, fair, enjoyable game, even with the off-and-on rain, and Reyna thought that was a good sign.

"Team I wins!" As the announcement echoed across the field, the two mud-streaked teams streamed into the open area by the Via Principia, shouting, trash-talking each other with grins, slapping hands and backs. Reyna was glad to see that even if the game had been a little less  _orthodox_  than usual, it seemed to have successfully built up camaraderie.

Taking a quick group-head count, she noticed there was still a fair amount of people in the woods. She considered using the megaphone but the stragglers were still coming out, in ones and threes mostly, though she saw a few groups of two that looked suspiciously flushed and rumpled.

Another group of two looked less like a couple and more like bickering neighbors—a tall, sickly pale guy in purple and a shorter, swarthy guy in orange. Octavian and Leo. Glancing around to make sure no one needed her, she headed for them. As far she knew, Leo didn't know about Octavian, but Octavian sure as hell seemed to know about Leo, and she didn't plan on letting it escalate into a fight.

Reyna's shoes stuck in the mud, and in the moment she looked down to yank herself free, she looked back up and Octavian had his knife out, his teddy-bear-murdering knife, and to a stranger it might look like he was just showcasing it but she knew that look on his face—sly as a fox but wicked as a hellhound—and she sped up, sliding in the mud. Neither male had noticed her yet.

Though visibly upset, Leo chose this of all times to stand his ground, his palms up to say  _what in Hades do you think you're doing?_  Octavian said something covered by a crack of thunder, his head bobbing sarcastically as he waved the point of the blade at the repair boy.

The first thing she was near enough to hear was the end of Leo's response: "none of your  _business_ ," in as brash and sassy a voice as she'd ever heard him use. Oh, gods.  _Don't rile him up_ , she prayed as she slipped again, unable to catch herself before she caked one knee in mud. She got back up and ran for them. For him.

Octavian stepped forward again, his grip tighter around his knife. He scowled as he spoke, the words screwing up his face. "It's my business who's dirtying Rome, some  _graecus_  polluting the name of—"

"Octavian,  _stop_!" Reyna put every ounce of her praetorship into the command, even as she felt mud spattering unimposingly up the back of her legs. She managed to skid to a stop without falling over, a feat of impressive grace at the moment.

"Speaking of polluted," the augur sneered, his knife still at the ready.

"Go back to the others," she ordered coldly. "Don't ever let me catch you bad-mouthing our allies again."

He gestured innocently behind her. "The others are here." And so they were: the two camps' worth of demigods were slowly following her across the field, coming to see what was happening. Close enough to see, maybe, yet too far to know.

Leo's hair caught fire as he looked at Reyna, but she refused to look at him. One glance away from Octavian . . .

"Oh, sure.  _I'm_  the danger." The augur could read her better than she liked. " _I'm_  not the praetor throwing my home and honor down the aqueduct for, what? A roll in the hay with a  _graecus_?"

"There was no hay involved," Leo sassed, and she could have kicked him.

Octavian's expression darkened, and the knuckles clenching the blade turned white. "You dishonor yourself," he said to her. "You dishonor the legion, you dishonor  _Rome_. You even manage to dishonor Greece, which takes skill given its already remarkable disgrace."

Reyna's head was pounding, and rain began to spew from the sky again, pelting the side of her face. This scarecrow had cheated her of sleep and repose and happiness, and she was done cowtowing to him. She opened her mouth, but the insubordinate wretch  _talked over her_.

"In the midst of all this dishonorable talk of allies, I wonder if you've forgotten that allies are meant to be temporary. You liaise, you win, you separate." His blade gleamed, raindrops collecting on its cold, smooth surface. Octavian stepped toward Leo, his knife out, heels digging into the dirt. "And if a former ally puts you or your people in danger, then you fight back, and you  _kill them_."

Reyna watched in slow motion, feeling the dread well up in her gut but unable to move to stop him. Lightning cracked against the blue-black clouds, the flash illuminating the augur's practiced hand as he slashed forward and up, tearing into Leo's stomach with what seemed to Reyna like a burst, an eruption, an ugly horrendous explosion of scarlet.

Swearing in Spanish, Leo stumbled backward. Clutching his hands to the wound, looking down in shock at the blood seeping between his fingers and staining his clothes.

Reyna watched him keel slowly to the ground, and she didn't realize she'd followed him until the mud soaked through her jeans and socks. He fell backward. There was mud in his curls. She couldn't make anything work—her mouth, her hands, her roiling insides—oh gods. Oh gods.

"Need a healer," she managed, an order that was no louder than a gasp, and when she repeated it louder someone moved toward them but she didn't look back to see who. No one else  _mattered_.

Barely able to lift his head, Leo poked weakly at his torn abdomen and immediately paled.

"Don't touch it, don't touch it," she whispered, tugging his fingers away from the wound, nauseated by the warm red staining both their hands. "You need a healer."

He looked up at her, dark eyes wide and glazed. "There's a lot of—"

"I know, I know." Reyna was repeating herself. She didn't know what to say. She touched her hand to his cheek, wiping some of the mud away. Was there a healer? Was someone coming? Gods, if they had to leave someone to die, let it be  _her_. Not the poor, sweet, honest boy who could dance salsa and kept a photograph of his dead mother on his workshop wall.

Someone crouched next to her. Not Octavian, she could see that much out of the corner of her eye. Reyna was only looking at Leo, her hair soaked with rain and half unbraided and falling onto his chest, she was leaning so close over him. Her neighbor's hand touched her back, and she hit it away, her eyes burning with rain. It had to be rain; only rain could sting so much and run so thick down her cheeks.

"We need to take him," said her neighbor, but she couldn't process it. Take him where?

"Really cold,  _reina_ ," Leo sighed, his words trembling. "And tired."

"No, stay awake," she ordered. His breathing seemed too shallow. "Don't—please—" His eyes drifted from her, lids closing. In a last-ditch effort, she dropped and kissed him, hard, on his bloody muddy rainy mouth. She pressed her lips against his, waiting for a burst of hair fire that never came.

Nothing.

Oh gods.


	11. Act Eleven: Camp Jupiter

_She pressed her lips against his, waiting for a burst of hair fire that never came._

_Nothing._

_Oh gods._

Rain poured from the dark afternoon sky. Thunder shook the field as a few of the Greek demigods (children of Apollo?) hustled over with a stretcher enchanted to hover at waist height; they picked Leo up with great care, loaded him onto it, and headed for New Rome, probably the small on-site hospital.

Reyna's eyes still burned, and she stared at the ground where the son of Hephaestus had lain just a moment ago. Her neighbor touched her tentatively on the back again, and the voice of Will Solace said the only thing he could have to make her look at him:

"He isn't dead."

Reyna did look up at him then. Blood all over his hands and forearms, the healer looked tired and worried but not deathbed haunted.

"He's unconscious, probably from hemorrhagic shock. I did what I could for now, but we'll have to sit on him a couple days in the hospital, make sure he recovers okay. It's a big wound, especially after his mess right after the war." He looked her in the face and, apparently, saw something there that made him pity her. "I can't make any promises. But he should come out of it fine."

 _Should_  was better than  _has no chance to_. She exhaled sharply, looking down and planting her palms on the ground. Finally she pushed herself to her feet, disregarding the layers of mud and rain and blood and sweat now soaking her. She would have liked to have a moment to herself, but she had no such luck.

Feet spread confidently, Octavian stood at an angle between her and the crowd, chin tilted upward. He opened his mouth, clearly ready to launch into a perfected speech to turn her Romans against her. In an infuriating moment, she realized that he had almost killed Leo  _just so he could showcase her duplicity_ , and she saw red.

"You smug little bastard," she snarled.

This, understandably, threw him off balance.

"How dare you touch him! You attacked an ally, a friend, in cold blood—!"

"'Our allies,'" Octavian repeated smoothly, regaining control. "Really? You can  _ally_  with a person or country without inviting them into your safest city, without turning them into your best friends and lovers and telling them all your secrets. And you must define 'friend' loosely too"—he looked at her with disgust—"because I think everyone saw you adding in benefits just now."

People muttered in the crowd. Reyna felt her cheeks burning, but she didn't deny the charge. How could she?

He turned, now addressing the crowd. "Your praetor has been having an affair with a Greek boy, for who knows how long. She has hidden this from you. What else is she hiding?"

"Wait a second." Jason stepped out of the masses, confusion etched on his face. "Even if Reyna  _is_  with Leo—which, okay, it kind of looks like you are," he admitted to her, " _I'm_  dating a Greek too. How is there a difference?"

"You're hardly Roman since you came back," the augur said scathingly. "You were changed at the other camp. That hardly counts as a viable counterexample."

"And Percy?"

"He's fully Greek. You can't contaminate the contaminating substance."

The crowd muttered. A few of the Greeks repeated, " _Contaminate?_ " with offense in their tone. Octavian quickly realized his misstep, but it was enough to give Reyna hope. She stepped forward, her shoes squelching in the mud as rain dripped from her hair into her face.

"All right, yes," she declared, loudly enough for both camps to hear. "I have been in a relationship with Leo Valdez."

The crowd burst with questioning, confused talk. Nausea twisted her stomach—dreams too real, night after night, started very much like this—but she didn't back down.

"I didn't feel it was appropriate to make either of us a topic of gossip, so we kept it quiet. If that counts as hiding, then fine. But that's it. The rest of my life is Rome, and you know that."

Hundreds of faces stared at her, some familiar, some nameless. Most of them looked confused, maybe interested, but at least not bloodthirsty. Annabeth was nodding encouragingly. Reyna swallowed and forged onward.

"I think—" Augh. She should have prepared talking points. "I think it's not an issue so much of Greeks versus Romans. I mean, we beat Gaea together, we've spent these two weeks getting along. If we were going to go to war, we probably would have done it by now."

More muttering. Bringing up inter-camp war—not the right direction. She tried to steer back into the right lane, but Octavian was all over the flub.

"She can't defend her choices because she knows they were wrong," he declared, jabbing his index finger toward her. "Sneaking around, threatening anyone who called her out on it—"

"I didn't threaten anyone," she snapped. "Except for maybe you, because you are a dirty, manipulating—" Annabeth was shaking her head no. Reyna collected herself and continued coldly, "If we can accuse anyone of lying, sneaking, and threatening, it's  _you_ , Octavian."

The crowd turned almost as one to see the blow cross Octavian's face. A pleased someone (it sounded like Percy) muttered, "Oh, snap."

"You have belittled various people, including myself. You have threatened, you have coerced innumerable demigods against their will. Your ambition blinds you to basic prerequisites like loyalty and trustworthiness. Plus you're just a bastard. If I have disgraced the legion, you have done so a hundred times over."

Octavian lifted his chin, but his eyes were dark and troubled. "You can't just vote me off the island, Reyna," he said, his tone disparaging, but the worry in his eyes gave him away.

Reyna lifted her own chin and looked to the crowd. Screw tradition. Screw formality. She had an hospital to get to. "I call a Roman trial, right now. Based on the evidence, as praetor I recommend the augur Octavian be stripped of his rank and be dishonorably discharged from the legion. All in favor?"

Hands went up. Easily the entire legion, plus a fair portion of the Greek cabins.

"All dissenting?"

Hands went down as quickly as they'd gone up.

For the first time maybe ever, Octavian turned even paler as he slowly realized that he had lost, in a big way.

"Let it be written," she pronounced with no small satisfaction. "Let it be done."

* * *

Gods, Reyna hated paperwork. She signed the fifty things the senators threw at her and then all but ran to the hospital in New Rome. It didn't take a lot of brainpower to figure out which corner Leo was in: the soldiers standing guard made a nice clue. As she strode toward them, one tried to stop her, but she gave him such a withering look he let her pass. She brushed past the curtain and almost ran into Will Solace.

"You probably shouldn't be in here," the healer warned, trying to gently turn her around, but she was having none of it.

"I will hang from the curtain if I have to," she said, shaking him off. "I'm staying." She was serious, and he seemed to realize it. Holding up his hands, he sat back down in his plastic folding chair and let her take a seat in its twin on the other side of the hospital bed.

Reyna leaned over the edge of the bed, afraid to put much pressure on it. Still unconscious, Leo lay unnaturally still, swaddled in white bedsheets and wearing a clean white undershirt, probably borrowed from a storage bin. No blood, no dirt, no oil, no motion. Even his chest barely moved as he breathed. She took his hand without thinking about it, wishing it felt warmer.

"How is he?" she asked Will, trying not to sound like a weepy teenage girl, even if that was how she felt at the moment.

He gave a half shrug. "He's doing pretty well, all things considered. We cleaned the gash, healed the internal injury as best we could, stitched it up. He's had as much ambrosia and nectar as we could give him. Obviously we're keeping him sedated, just to keep his functions at the minimum."

She traced the bones in her repair boy's hand with her fingernail and kept her expression neutral. After her veritable emotional explosion at Octavian, she was more than ready to hide behind a mask again, at least for a little while. "How long will it take before you know for sure if he's going to make it?"

"Hard to say." Will shrugged again. "If the wound doesn't reopen, he might be okay to come off the sedation in the next day or so."

Reyna wanted to order him to  _stop shrugging, gods damn it, she wanted someone experienced and professional to heal Leo_ , but she knew it wouldn't help. Will was one of the best healers between the two camps. He could shrug as much as he wanted, just as long as his patient made it out of the hospital.

Eventually he got up and left her there, alone with a barely alive Leo, and she didn't know what to do. It was an unsettling feeling, one she had to replace by acting, doing something,  _anything_ , really. So she tried talking.

"I called Octavian a bastard," Reyna said to Leo, unsure if he could hear her or not. She decided that either way, she would pretend he could. It was less depressing than the other option. "Twice, I think. And he's leaving the legion—dishonorable discharge. I headed that up, too. Maybe you should get stabbed more often." She tried to force a smile, but it was too soon to joke. Her eyes began to burn, and even as she tried to blink it away, a few tears ran down her nose.

"Get a grip," she told herself. Unsurprisingly, that didn't help. Exhaustion and emotional trauma had thrown her entirely out of sorts. She lay her head down so that her forehead was resting on the corner of the bed. A brief rest, and she would be fine again. That was what she told herself as her eyes closed.


	12. Act Twelve: Camp Jupiter

_Reyna lay stretched out on a towel on the lakeshore, the sun warming her sunscreened-up skin even through her swimsuit cover-up and sunglasses. The lake water pulsed gently on the sand, and though the sky was clear, there was only one other person on the beach with her. She slid her sunglasses down her nose and propped herself up on her elbows so she could look over at the other beachgoer properly._

_He lay on his own towel a few feet away, facing away from her. Curly black hair, scrawny but swarthy. She was surprised by the powerful fondness that swelled in her gut._

_But as she opened her mouth to call him over, he glanced her way. It wasn't Leo. She didn't know_ who _he was—just that he didn't have the pointed ears, upturned nose, intensely dark eyes that she'd spent the last two weeks staring at. He smiled at her, and no devilish dimples appeared. She slid her sunglasses back up to the bridge of her nose and looked away, disoriented and disappointed._

Reyna jerked awake, blinking blearily as she peeled her face away from the edge of Leo's bed. She wasn't sure how long she'd been asleep, but based on the darkness outside, she suspected it had been a while. Someone had set a fresh set of clothes for her at the corner of the mattress, a subtle reminder that she was still in her nasty outfit from earlier that afternoon. With one last look at her sedated, unconscious love interest, she stood up, quietly brushed past the curtain, and ducked into the ladies' room to wash up and change.

When she came back out, she realized that the guard had been dismissed for the night, and the people she had thought were the guard were actually Annabeth and Piper, playing a silent version of the card game Kings in the Corner. Based on the miming going on, Annabeth was trying very hard not to be a rude winner. When they looked up at her, Piper seemed glad for the distraction.

"What time is it?" Reyna asked, unsure why they were up so late, and here of all places, without their male counterparts.

Annabeth checked her watch. "Twenty after midnight," she reported. "And your fellow praetors noticed you hadn't been to your villa since the incident"—meaning Leo being gutted by a power-hungry augur—"and they asked us to hang out here and keep an eye on you."

Piper nodded.

Reyna wavered somewhere between impressed and offended. "They noticed?"

"Well, we asked them about it," Piper admitted. "And the answer was a generally negative guess."

Well, that was comforting. "Thanks, but you both are welcome to go to bed. I can take care of myself."

Annabeth slid all the cards back into a stack and shuffled them into form, and then she stood, pulling Piper to her feet as well. "You probably should go home too. Leo's not waking up in the next twelve hours, and you need sleep that won't land you in a chiropractor's office." The architect's brow creased sympathetically, but she spoke logic. Reluctantly, Reyna followed the two Greek girls out of the hospital and back down the road to the barracks and Principia.

* * *

Reyna returned to the hospital at six a.m. sharp, after a long night of staring at the ceiling (although, yes, granted, her spine  _didn't_  feel like it was going to cave in on itself), and she stayed in her folding chair beside Leo's bed until Percy came by at noon and dragged her to the lake for the picnic. The weather was nice today, at least, but she wasn't hungry and she would rather have been back in the makeshift hospital room keeping watch over an unconscious boy.

_That sounded less creepy in my head_ , she decided.  _Maybe half an hour in the sun for lunch wouldn't be amiss._

So she kept pace with Percy as they made their way through the blankets laid out on the sand. It didn't take long before she noticed that she was getting  _looks_. Not mean looks, exactly, but strange ones, anywhere on the spectrum from curious to confused to discomfited. She kept her head high and refused to react, but her stomach was sinking. Octavian might be taken care of, but it wasn't exactly going to be smooth sailing from here on out.

When the two praetors reached the rest of the Seven (the Six?) on a full-size Finding Nemo blanket, Percy dropped beside Annabeth with a grin, and Reyna folded herself down carefully into the corner between him and Hazel. She planned to eat her steak and grilled asparagus, maybe briefly pretend to join in conversation, and then leave. These plans, unfortunately, didn't make it past the first stage of execution. She was cutting her third asparagus stalk into equal bite-size pieces when Percy said in a forced casual tone, "You know, I was wondering the same thing. Reyna, care to elaborate?"

She looked up in surprise; she hadn't been following the topics. "Sorry?"

"Piper here was just commenting that as a daughter of Aphrodite, she felt a little at loss for your newly declared relationship status."

Reyna speared a piece of asparagus with her fork. "What about it." It wasn't a question. She had hoped to save this talk for another time, maybe when the other half of the relationship wasn't comatose.

"How come you never said anything?" Hazel blurted, hurt flashing through her eyes.

Reyna chewed slowly. "Like I said yesterday, I didn't want people talking."

"We're your  _friends_ , Reyna," Piper reprimanded her. "We wouldn't have talked about it if you asked us not to."

The Puerto Rican praetor wanted to point out that she didn't really consider Piper her friend, that most of the Seven (with perhaps the exceptions of Percy, Jason, and Annabeth) were more like neutral-to-slightly-pleasant acquaintances, people with whom she chose to spend her little free time and who neither feared nor irritated her. She liked them, certainly, but trust was harder to come by than liking, especially when a daughter of Aphrodite (and former rival) was involved. But she only said, "I didn't know it would offend you," which was true.

"How long has it been going on?" Piper persisted, leaning against Jason, who appeared very interested in his cheeseburger. "You and Leo, I mean."

Reyna took another bite of asparagus and steak, hoping her face didn't look as warm as it felt. "Not long."

The corners of Annabeth's mouth twitched, a movement the blonde covered up with a big forkful of salad. Reyna eyed her suspiciously. It wouldn't surprise her if the blonde had known all along and had orchestrated half of it, but now wasn't the time to call her out on it.

"Half an hour not long, or the last two weeks not long?" Hazel seemed not to notice the strange shade of pink Frank's face was turning.

Reyna rolled her shoulders in a noncommittal shrug. "Does it  _matter?_ "

"Of course!"

She was trying to decide if "Leo and she" had started when they kissed, or the first time she got butterflies from his calling her  _reina_ , or after he'd accepted closed doors, when someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned to see a Roman from the Second Cohort, a twelve-year-old girl whose name might have been Callie, staring down at her.

"Yes?" the praetor asked politely.

Callie dug the toes of her flip-flops into the sand. "Is it true you're dating a Greek boy?" she squeaked.

Reyna pressed her lips together so she wouldn't sigh. "Yes, it's true," she said with a regal nod.

A few other girls, who had been pretending to conveniently walk by, giggled behind their hands.

_Dios mio_. Where was the respect, the deference, the fear? Reyna clenched her jaw. She wouldn't rise to a few children's taunts. Maybe her grace about it would be contagious.

Leaning in closer, Callie's whisper went up an octave with suppressed laughter. "Are Greeks as good of kissers as Romans?" The younger girl looked deliberately at Jason.

" _Excuse_  me?" Piper blurted.

Her expression hardening, Reyna refused to appear as flustered as she felt. "That is an entirely inappropriate question," she said sharply, but the girls were already fleeing, shrieking with laughter. When she turned back around to the group, Piper's face had gone a little pale, jaw clenched, and even oblivious Jason looked a little stunned by the encounter.

"I think I'll finish eating in the hospital," she said, and no one argued. She picked up her plate and headed back for the city, and the last thing she saw was Piper whispering something in Jason's ear, looking hurt.

* * *

At two o'clock, Annabeth came to visit Leo, or Reyna, or both. The blonde made herself comfortable in Will Solace's chair and looked over the still-unconscious Leo like one might a sick younger brother.

"I know what you're feeling," she said with no preamble, making Reyna's head jerk up. "It sucks more than anyone knows, and I'm sorry."

Reyna nodded once, shortly, in acknowledgement. If anyone understood this and more, it was the girl sitting across from her. "How long have you known?"

Annabeth smiled faintly. "I began to make educated guesses about halfway through last week."

"And you said nothing because . . .?"

"Because you would tell us when you were ready. Or when you were forced to reveal your hand, but I didn't want to be that person." She smoothed her bright orange shirt. "Piper's still upset, by the way. You might need to talk to her."

Reyna uncrossed her legs. "Talking to people isn't exactly a talent of mine. Besides, there's not really anything to talk about."

Annabeth gave her a look, and Reyna held it, a locking of gazes and wills. It probably would have gone on for quite a while had Will not walked in. They both looked over at him and nodded, letting it dissolve.

"Afternoon, ladies," he said amiably, pretending he hadn't just witnessed the beginnings of a  _my willpower is bigger than your willpower_ contest. "I'm here to check out our favorite patient, so if you want to leave, now's your chance."

Annabeth graciously stood to give the healer his chair back, but instead of leaving, she walked around the bed to stand by Reyna. Will shrugged and leaned over the bed to peel the sheets back and roll Leo's shirt up to his diaphragm.

Up til now, Reyna hadn't really looked at Leo's wound, because at the time of wounding she'd been too busy feeling like she was breaking in half, and since then he'd been wrapped in bandages and hospital sheets, so she hadn't really wanted to go poking around. But now she looked, really looked, and she had to breathe deeply as Will unwrapped the ace bandages around Leo's torso.

The scar was stitched up and clearly further along in the healing process than it should have been—it looked a few weeks old rather than a day. But even so, the scar tore from just above his waistline to his bottom rib, ugly and painful, no matter who cleaned it up and hurried it along. She wondered how long it would be with him. A reminder of her own stupidity.

Will checked the stitching carefully, probed lightly, took a few doctorly measurements; and his expression lightened. "He's healing great," he said to Reyna, who almost smiled. "I'm going to rewrap him and take him off sedation, and he should be waking up in the next few hours."

"Great," Annabeth said. "Thanks, Will."

He nodded and grinned at them both before getting back to business.

"I'll stay until he wakes," Reyna said in an undertone to Annabeth, which they both knew was another way of saying  _I'm not going to talk to Piper right now and you can't make me_.

"You have to have dinner."

"I've survived on less."

Annabeth gave her a hard look, which she returned. It could have lasted longer, but a silent compromise passed between them:  _later_. She went back to watching Will work, and the blonde squeezed her shoulder as she left.

Reyna had a number of things to remember to do: handle the last few days of the celebration, have a girl talk with Piper, probably finish the lunch conversation with the Seven, make sure Octavian found his way out of the legion quickly and quietly. Nothing that she was looking forward to. But for now she would just sit and wait, another thing she wasn't very good at, because she  _was_  looking forward to having her repair boy back.

She took his hand with one of hers and rested her chin on her other, determined to stay awake, but after Will left she made the mistake of resting her eyes. The relaxation turned into a catnap.

* * *

Soft conversation outside Leo's partitioned-off "room" stirred Reyna from sleep. It took her a moment to realize that she had actually been . . . resting. She hadn't even been dreaming. Surprised, she rolled back up into a sitting position and prepared to get up to very curtly instruct the talkers to shut up or leave.

"There must be something wrong with my eyes," mumbled a faint voice from the bed. "I can't . . . take them off you."


	13. Act Thirteen: Camp Jupiter

" _There must be something wrong with my eyes," mumbled a faint voice from the bed. "I can't . . . take them off you."_

Reyna whirled to see Leo looking over at her, smiling groggily. She slammed her butt back in the chair and scooted so close that her navel was pressed against the edge of the mattress. "Are you okay?" she asked, looking him over like a captain would a wounded soldier. Was he supposed to be awake already? Oh gods, she was just glad he  _had_  woken up. She couldn't even find it in her to be upset about the briefly terrifying pickup line. "Does anything hurt? How do you feel?" She touched his forehead, checking for fever or chills, her fingertips skimming his curls.

"I . . . feel a little floppy," he admitted, rolling his head from side to side. He spoke slowly, like his tongue felt thick. Maybe he was dehydrated. She glanced around for supplies and found her canteen by her foot, still full from her last trip to the water fountain.

"You want water?" She unscrewed the lid and held out the canteen. He nodded, but when she poured it, half dribbled out onto his chin. He chuckled lightly and almost choked. She breathed out sharply—not quite a laugh but the closest she could come right now. Leave it to Leo to survive disembowelment and then almost die trying to drink water. "It's for drinking _,_ not wearing,  _idiota_."

"Ouch," he managed, flopping one hand dramatically onto his chest. "That hurts. Somebody forgot to take . . . her happy pills this morning."

"Yeah, I wish." He wasn't going to drink any more, so she closed up the canteen and set it aside.

Leo hummed a few slow, off-key notes to himself. "What time is it?"

"Just past four," Reyna said, checking her watch.

"Still Wednesday afternoon? I didn't do too—"

"Try Friday."

" _Friday?_ " His jaw dropped. "Holy Hephaestus, I've been out two days?"

She pursed her lips, pretending it hadn't been an excruciating wait. "Just like you, Valdez. Make everyone wait around and then act innocent."

" _Dios mio, reina_." Gingerly he tried to push himself to an upright position, but he winced and fell back on the pillow. The expended effort seemed to wind him. "Not my fault I was . . . mortally wounded in battle."

"It was at the end of a mostly peaceable war game. Did you notice no one else had trouble getting out alive?" She felt her brow crease tight as she frowned at him. "Why in the  _hell_  were you arguing with Octavian?"

"He was besmirching both our honors," Leo defended himself in an undertone. "Only a really lame boyfriend would have walked away."

"A really lame boyfriend would have at least made it out without being stabbed," she insisted, her fingers tightening around his. "I think my honor can take it." Of course, a week's worth of nightmares contradicted her bravado, but she chose not to bring that up.

He stood by his decision, even as he peeked at the scar seared across his stomach. "Well, you're welcome anyway."

She sighed. "Thank you. But if you do something stupid like that again, I'm going to stab you myself and string you up in New Rome."

Looking up, he caught the concern lurking behind her severity, and he smiled at her. Relief, fondness, anxiety, reassurance hid behind his teasing. He didn't want her to be angry with him. Gods, she was going soft.

"I have work to do," she said, half-rising from her seat and jerking her thumb over her shoulder in the general direction of the Principia. "If you don't have anyth—"

"Staaay," he interrupted, at such a high-pitched keen it could only be classified as a whine. " _Reinaaaaa_."

"Don't whine," she ordered, but she sat back down. A look of gleeful childish victory lit up his face, and she wanted to resent it, really she tried, and somehow she just couldn't manage it.

* * *

That was about all the excitement Leo could take, though, and he fell back asleep not twenty minutes later. Reyna leaned back in her chair and looked out the window, debating whether she could leave. By now, of course, he was obviously improved enough that she  _should_  be able to get up and go—Will could keep an eye on him if need be. Logically, this made plenty of sense. She had work to do; Leo was just sleeping and recovering. She didn't need to be there. But watching him wince in his sleep, she didn't seem to be able to remove herself either.

By the grace of the gods, Annabeth stopped by before dinner to bring her a plate of grilled vegetables and a big stack of papers from the Principia —forms to fill out, plans to sign off on, letters to read and respond to. Deciding she definitely liked the blonde, Reyna ate the flawless food before she hooked her heel into the bedframe and used her thigh as a worktable.

The light in the window darkened from white to orange to navy as afternoon passed into evening. Leo kept waking up and then falling back asleep, becoming a little more coherent each time. There were fireworks planned for later, but Reyna still had a few hours until she needed to make an appearance, so she just turned on a lamp and kept working in the hospital. She was halfway through the letters, though if she read one more anonymous snarky "suggestion" she might actually toss the entire stack. The curtain rustled, and as the praetor looked up from her paperwork, Piper poked her head in, forcing a smile. Reyna forced one in return. At least the daughter of Aphrodite seemed to be alone; she didn't much want to be in tight quarters with the affectionate couple at the moment. Piper sat down in Will's chair and looked over Leo, obvious fondness in her kaleidoscope eyes. "How is he?" she asked.

Reyna fingered his hand in hers. "Better," she said. "The sedating medicine has mostly worn off, and he was asking about Festus before he fell asleep."

Sighing in relief, Piper nodded. The room went silent, other than Leo's whistling snores, but then she said, "He was my best friend when we were at the Wilderness School. Even before we found out we were demigods, we just clicked. Two giant freaks in a group of regular freaks."

Did this count as small talk or girl talk? Reyna wasn't very good at either. She said nothing but tried to put on an encouraging face; it must have been convincing, because Piper took a deep breath and continued.

"Even after—even after Jason appeared, and he and I started, you know, spending a lot of time together, Leo stuck with us. And I appreciated it. I mean, he's a little nuts and his puns suck, but he's silly and sweet, so it's not like he couldn't make other friends. He hung around because he's a loyal guy. A  _good_  guy."

"I know." Well, she disagreed about the puns being bad.

"And still my best friend," Piper continued, "even if I haven't seen much of him lately." She looked the praetor in the eye expectantly, like this made everything clear.

Reyna hazarded a guess: "And you wish we would have told you we had come to an arrangement?"

Piper nodded, brow creased and lips pressed together, setting off Reyna's anti-emotions radar. She thought she had already addressed this at lunch yesterday, but it couldn't hurt to remind her. Wounded teenage girls could be dangerous.

"I'm sorry," the praetor said, though apologizing again nettled her. "I hadn't thought of its offending anyone. It wasn't meant as an attack on your friendship."

Looking away, the daughter of Aphrodite shrugged and tried to collect herself. "I know," she admitted, rubbing one of the feathers in her hair between her thumb and forefinger like a good luck charm.

Now Reyna was  _really_  confused. If she already knew, what was the point of bringing it up—to hear her say it again? No . . . Piper seemed to be working herself up to addressing something else.

"I was wondering, though. About what that girl said at lunch yesterday."

Oh.

Piper stared determinedly at her hands on the edge of Leo's mattress. "I would like to know, once and for all, what really happened with you and Jason," she said, quiet and broken, and although there was no charmspeak in her voice, Reyna pitied her enough to comply.

"Truly? Nothing happened." Missing her armor, the praetor straightened her T-shirt and retook Leo's hand, trying to focus on the warmth there. This topic, remembering her whatever-it-was (love, fondness, unrequited attraction) for Jason even though it was long over, hurt more than she thought it should. "Juno displaced him before anything  _could_  happen, though to be honest, I'm not sure now if he saw me like I saw him. And when he came back with you . . . As a daughter of war, I know what battles I have a chance of winning. That was not one of them."

The other girl seemed a little encouraged by this. "So Greek versus Roman kissing . . .?"

"I couldn't say."

"Oh." Piper tried not to look seriously relieved, but it was easy to see security slowly settle over her. Reyna decided not to comment—it was the better part of valor, and she couldn't begrudge her her desire to keep Jason. There was a time when she would have felt the same.

Both girls looked at Leo, who let out a whistle that Festus would have been proud of. Piper laughed a little to herself, and Reyna's lips twitched into an almost-smile; their eyes met, and Reyna wondered if they might one day be something like friends.

His face splitting in a wide yawn, Leo half-opened one eye and arched his back in a lazy stretch. He grinned when he saw his visitors. "Hey, beauty queen. Hey,  _quer_ — _reina_. Wouldn't you know it's the ladies who visit the amazing Leo in his infirmity."

"Don't flatter yourself. I came to talk to Reyna," Piper teased him. "For the last three days your lady has practically had to be dragged away from here for luxuries like food and sleep."

"Aww, my lady?" Leo echoed, pretending to laugh it off, but he looked questioningly at Reyna.

She shrugged, only now remembering that they hadn't yet discussed anything that happened after the stabbing. "Secret's out," she admitted.

"Whaaat?" he cried. "You told everyone and I didn't get to be there?"

"Oh, you were there," Piper told him with a mischievous smile. "She planted a big one on you right before you passed out."

"Damn! I don't remember it at all. We'll have to reenact it later."

"And then she gave Octavian the dressing down of a lifetime," she continued. "And kicked him out of the legion."

"I'm going to marry this woman," Leo declared loudly, pointing at Reyna. Cheeks hot, she shushed him, but she was smiling.

Piper pushed her chair back and stood, smiling herself. "I'll leave you two alone now," she teased. "Talk to you later, Reyna. Don't do anything stupid, Leo."

"I promise to do at least one stupid thing before I see you again," he grinned.

The daughter of Aphrodite shook her head, laughing, and unexpectedly she clasped Reyna on the shoulder as she left. They parted allies, maybe even almost friends—at least not enemies or mere acquaintances. Reyna felt that was pretty successful for a heart-to-heart for which she hadn't prepared talking points.

"Things have changed," Leo said in awe. She glared at him. "It's a good thing,  _querida_!"

"I'm going to put you back to sleep."

"Nah, too boring, miss had-to-be-dragged-away-from-her-darling-Leo. Now, how about you give me a play-by-play of how you brought the smackdown on Octavian, and then we can reenact your relationship-revealing liplock?"

" _Idiota_ ," she said, rolling her eyes, but she smiled as she went for the reenactment first.


	14. Act Fourteen: Camp Jupiter

"I'm really feeling weak, queen-face. Are you sure I can't put my arm around you—for, you know, support?"

"Weak, my ass. Try actually sitting upright." Resting her weight on her hip, Reyna wore her best No Nonsense expression, waiting for Leo to actually put forth effort to get up from his hospital bed. Will had declared him well enough to go . . . if he ever actually  _went_.

"Watch your language," he scolded her. "There could be children outside this room." Then he sat up too fast, apparently making pain explode in his head, as he clamped his hands to his temples and swore profusely, and only half in Spanish.  _Watch your language_ , indeed.

"Come on. Up, up, up." She gripped him by the forearm and lifted him halfway to a standing position, just far enough that his feet fell off the mattress and touched the floor. He groaned, but he stood, slow and wobbly. Pale, off-balance, but vertical. She felt that was enough of an improvement that when he slipped his right arm over her shoulder, she didn't shake it off. Will held the curtain open for them as they shuffled out of the makeshift room.

Reyna and Leo left the hospital and began to make their way slowly across New Rome toward the  _Argo II_ , stopping every so often so he could catch his breath and she could tease him about being a weakling. But it didn't take more than a few minutes out in the open, late in the well-populated Saturday morning, before he noticed the looks. The stares, the creased brows, the crinkled noses. He grinned, made faces, but eventually leaned over to ask, "Uh, Rey-Rey, do I have something on my face?"

She had to crane her neck, given that he was hanging over her shoulder. "Nope. Grease-free. At least until we get to the ship."

"What are the weird looks for, then?"

Clenching her jaw, she kept walking towards the ship. It wasn't far now.

"You said you told them." His hand tightened on the crook of her arm, and his tone dropped like he thought she might have lied.

"I did tell them. Can we talk about this when we're inside?" Ah, here. They stopped in front of Festus' head; Leo and the dragon exchanged some friendly clicks and whirs, and then the two demigods boarded, heading for the workshop by the engine room. He had barely flopped into his hammock when he brought it back up.

" _Reina_ ," he said, holding onto her fingers so she had to sit within arm's reach of him. She slumped against the wall and slid to the floor, letting her arm hang up where he held it. "If you told everybody and Octavian's out, why are we getting weird looks?"

With her free hand Reyna began to pensively finger her braid, smoothing the stray bits back into place. She tried not to let her face clench up; it was a dead giveaway. The nightmares had stopped since her showdown with Octavian, but she still remembered them all too well. "It's still . . . a foreign concept to most of them."

He sounded offended as he said, "They don't give Jason and Percy weird looks."

"I know." Rotating her jaw, she tried to take a deep breath, but it ended up just being a big shudder.

Leo leaned over the edge of his hammock to look her over, concern creasing his face. " _Reina_ , are people giving you trouble?"

"It's nothing I can't handle," she said, trying to convince herself as much as him, and really it should have been true. She wasn't being demoted, she wasn't being executed, life ought to have been sunshine and rainbows. But her Romans took issue with her, and she knew it, and she hated it.

His grip on her hand tightened. "That's not cool. Has this been going on the whole time I was out of commission?"

She said nothing.

Leo swore in a huff under his breath. "And you're  _okay_  with this?"

"I spent the last week expecting to be beheaded when they found out," Reyna snapped, glaring at him. " _No_ , I'm not okay with it. But it's better than it could be."

That quieted him. "Beheaded?" he finally asked, hesitant.

She grumpily stroked her braid. She shouldn't have said anything. "Octavian was saying stuff."

"Octavian talks shit, you can't listen to him."

"You think I wanted to?" She pulled her hand away, glaring full force. "Gods, I even had to dream about it. Do you know how many ways an ex-praetor can be executed by a Roman mob?  _Forty-three._  My brain thought of forty-three ways in five nights."

Sliding onto the floor and scooting to sit across from her, Leo pulled his knees up to his chest and knocked his chin against them as he thought on this new information. "You weren't having nightmares about pirates," he said finally, in a low, ashamed tone. "You were having nightmares about the consequences of dating me." For once, the idea of their being together didn't set him aflame; he only drooped, curled a little more into himself, depressed that their relationship had had such an effect on her. She wanted to reassure him, but really, what could she say? He'd hit the nail on the head.

They sat in silence in the workshop, listening to the muted creaks and whistles of the engine room next door. Not snacking, not joking, not speaking at all, not even looking at each other. Reyna undid and redid her braid, working it carefully with her slim fingers so that it ended up pristine.

"Wait," Leo said, lifting his head from his knees. "I don't think even bloodthirsty Romans would have killed you if you dumped me and sent me away. Are you saying you died  _forty-three times_  because you wouldn't reject me?"

Cheeks heating up a little, she stroked the sleek end of the braid. "More," she admitted. "A couple times they repeated."

"Holy Hep _hae_ stus," he exhaled, and when she dared to look up he was staring at her in awe, solemnity and respect in his eyes like he truly felt the weight of the revelation. She blinked a few times and swallowed thickly, the lump in her throat burning as she fought to appear calm. He didn't try to hug her or kiss her—didn't touch her at all, actually—and she was glad. She probably would have become weepy, and the loyalties of a weepy teenage girl were not nearly as impressive to earn as the loyalties of a stoic praetor.

* * *

They stayed in his  _Argo_  workshop until noon, at which time one of his half-finished clock projects started to squawk and run around the workshop table banging against things until it beat a crater into its head. Leo hopped up to quickly disable whatever mechanism had faulted, and as he tinkered, his stomach let out an emphatic grumble. He glanced at Reyna, then at the door, and it didn't take a genius to figure out he was ready for lunch, so she pushed herself to her feet.

"Let's go," she said, giving him an  _it's okay_  look, so he braved a small smile and walked with her out the door.

The two of them walked side-by-side from the ship to the mess hall, close enough that their shoulders brushed occasionally, and sometimes when they passed another demigod, Leo hooked one of his fingers around one of hers, a quiet claim and reassurance. Nothing dramatic. No Octavian-style standoffs. It just  _was_. More often than not, the other demigods simply went on their way.

The mess hall was rowdy and active, nothing new there. Lunch was already so far underway that even the late entrance of a praetor didn't distract more than a few people from their food and conversation. The two of them still attached by hooked fingers, Reyna led Leo over to the rest of the Seven and sat down, prim and silent. An aura brought her the usual, steak and grilled asparagus, with extra asparagus, as if it knew she needed extra sustenance for this meal.

The others looked them over warily, but no one said anything until Piper broke the ice. "You feeling better, then, Leo?" she asked him, the brightness in her tone only slightly forced.

He pretended to salute her. "Back in top condition, beauty queen, ma'am."

She rolled her eyes and took a perfect bite of her mashed potatoes. Wiping his mouth, Percy looked up from his blue waffles to ask, "You gonna be okay to fly us back?"

"Probably tomorrow," Leo said, but he glanced at Reyna and sadness, disappointment, flashed through his eyes, just for a moment: he'd forgotten he needed to leave. Frankly, she'd kind of been hoping to put it off.

"We can wait," Annabeth suggested. Reyna looked her way, and the blonde's brow was creased in sympathy. "I don't think we're imposing, and we definitely want you to be okay for such a big trip. It wouldn't be a big deal to take a few more days—right, Reyna?"

"Right," she said, surprised. "That'd be fine."

Laughing like a victorious child, Leo grinned and nudged her on the shoulder; she rolled with the movement, trying not to blush and failing miserably. "You have me for a few extra days—what are your other two wishes?" he teased her.

She snorted, but a smile tugged at her lips. "Eat your food," she ordered, and he did, widening his eyes and pretending to grimace in terror at her tone. As everyone went tentatively back to their meal, it didn't escape her that the two of them had six pairs of eyes on them, observing the couple that had caused all the drama of the last few days. It was about as subtle as they could be, which was to say not very. Reyna pretended not to notice every time Leo's knee brushed against hers and sparked, or the few times one of the Seven opened their mouth only to be shut down by a sharp look from the others. But when conversation started back up, the others did notice Leo's bounce, his extra-wide grin and extra-cheesy puns, and the small smile that crept onto Reyna's face at least twice more before dessert. And she herself was so busy watching him stuff his face, amused by his antics and relieved just to have him around again, that she forgot to keep an eye on Jason and Piper.

By the time they all filled up and parted ways, the rest of the Seven seemed at peace with Leo and Reyna's relationship. In her books, it was a good lunch.

* * *

Reyna stopped by her villa to change clothes and pick up her beach basket, and then she swept out the door, leaving dogs-surrounded Leo to decide whether to follow her or not, which of course meant he would follow, if he knew what was best for him.

The door swung open again behind her, slamming shut as he trotted out into the sun. "Hey, aren't you forgetting something?" he called.

"What?"

He scrambled to catch up, running in front of her with his arms wide like he wanted to yell  _Ta-da!_  "Me!"

"Hmm," she considered, looking him over playfully. "No, I think I meant to leave that behind."

"Aww, you don't mean it."

"Is that a challenge?"

"Nooo." He matched her pace, and they went on their way. "Do we really have to do this now? I mean, I'm all for you in a swimsuit, but swimming sounds like hard work right now. Plus I bet the water is naaasty dirty." His complaints grew more and more pressing the closer they got, but she refused to grace them with responses.

When they reached the lake, Reyna set her beach basket down on the sand. It held sunscreen, towels, sunglasses, snacks, basically everything someone might want for the beach and then some. Will had suggested water therapy to help get Leo back on his feet and at least fit enough to walk five steps without needing a breather, and despite the repair boy's protests, she personally knew that the lake was clean enough for that. So now she wore her swimsuit and cover-up, and grumpy Leo had plunked himself down rebelliously in the sand, wriggling his butt in his swim trunks like  _I'm not going in there._  Well, they would see about that.

Very deliberately, she pulled the sunscreen out of the basket. Making quiet squeegee noises with her lips, she went to work lathering the protective liquid all up and down her neck, her shoulders, her arms, her  _lovely_  long legs. Leo was peeking over his shoulder; she waved the bottle in his direction.

"You need some too," she said in a tone that left no room for argument, and indeed he made good time scrambling over for sunscreen application. Tugging off his orange shirt, he looked at her hopefully. "You can apply your own," she told him, but immediately he put up such a show of pain and stiffness that she pursed her lips, rolled her eyes, and squirted the sunscreen into her left hand.

"Do I really have to get in the water?" Leo mumbled, frowning like a child served Brussels sprouts as he turned to face away from her.

"Yes." Reyna swiped a glob of sunscreen across the top of his back, parallel to his shoulders, and she would have been lying if she said she didn't take her good sweet time rubbing it in. For a scrawny guy, he had some strong shoulders. Probably a side effect of working constantly. She let her sunglasses slip a little down her nose.

"What if it infects my giant, gaping wound?" he persisted.

"Turn around." He pushed himself around so he was now facing her. She flicked some onto his nose and then went to work on his chest and arms. He really could have been doing this himself, she knew that full well. "The Apollo kids said your giant, gaping wound is practically good as new. Good try." And given her perfected evil eye, she knew they were telling the truth.

He looked down at her hands tracing purposeful circles on his abdomen. Both their faces flushed, she felt his stomach clench, and his hair began to crackle with flames. It took a minute to put it out, and the embers at the tips of his curls never really went away. She suppressed a smile as she closed the bottle of sunscreen.

"And now we get to wait until it's all dry."

He groaned, bouncing on his butt in the sand—a kid on Christmas morning. Apparently he only wanted to stay out of the water when he wasn't supposed to. What else was new. He stayed still for all of two minutes before hopping to his feet and heading for the edge of the water.

"Sit back down," Reyna called, hanging her head back and looking under her sunglasses at him.

Grinning, Leo turned around and waved innocently. "I'm only gonna wade,  _reiNNAAA_!" He promptly tripped over his own feet and plowed headfirst into the waves and sand. He came back up shaking the mud and water out of his hair like a dog.

She blew a strand of hair out of her face and sighed, the corners of her lips twitching.

"Come on, it's warm!"

Taking a moment to deliberate, she finally did get to her feet and make her way toward the edge of the water. She eyed it warily, but when it hit her toes it truly was warm, as promised, unlike the other camp's lake or the Long Island Sound. Trust a lava-blooded mechanic to actually know heat when he felt it. She waded deeper to get to him; he stood where the water came just above his waist—not terribly far, but for two medium-sized people, just far enough. She got there just in time to be knocked back by a chest-high wave.

"Ugh, thank you for that," Reyna complained as she spat out the water, trying to regain her balance against the tide, but instead Leo almost knocked her over with a tackle-hug. She flailed backward, slapping against the water, but he held her to him, his hands firmly on her waist and his mouth just as firmly on hers. She smacked him lightly on the chest but let her fingers move upward to comb through his hair.

Water therapy, indeed. She'd have to thank Will for the fantastic idea.


	15. Act Fifteen: Camp Jupiter

Tuesday morning arrived too soon. Leo's scar was healed over and hadn't hurt him for a few days, so the Apollo kids declared him safe to travel. The Greek campers packed up their things and loaded them onto the  _Argo II_  after breakfast, but this sendoff took even longer than the one at Camp Half-Blood as relationships, friendly and otherwise, had grown even stronger in the week and a half at Camp Jupiter.

So now the two camps were intermingled out in the forum of New Rome, saying their goodbyes and hugging every friend they ever made and grabbing their last cups of coffee and generally trying to drag out the departure as long as possible. Reyna and the Seven ended up congregating in the corner by Festus, who seemed unhappy to leave California—or maybe just Reyna—if his grumpy whirs and occasional spurts of flame were any indication. Annabeth and Piper hugged Hazel and tearfully promised to keep in touch; Percy held a slice of blue pie in one hand and exchanged fist bumps with Jason and Frank. Hazel hugged Leo, who looked like he wanted to tease Frank about it but decided it was not a good life decision. Reyna stood a little off to the side, unsure if she was part of the familial goodbyes, but Annabeth pulled her into a hug as well.

"Keep in touch," the blonde said firmly, clasping the praetor on the shoulders and looking her in the eye.

"I will." She was surprised to find she really did intend to. Annabeth smiled, a little happy and a little sad, and then she and Percy headed up into the ship, and Hazel and Frank diverged back into the rest of the crowd on the ground, leaving Jason and Piper to play one last game of tonsil hockey around the corner and Reyna and Leo to stand comfortably close under Festus' shadow. Even though their relationship was out in the open now, she wasn't sure how comfortable she was with such  _very_  public Public Displays of Affection, so she worried her thumbs and let him trace small circles on her hips.

" _Querida_ ," Leo said, attempting to break the melancholy silence, "if you were a Transformer, you'd be a  _hot_ -obot, and your name'd be Optimus Fine."

Reyna snorted a half-laugh, shaking her head and pretending to wrinkle her nose. "That's how you want me to remember you?" she asked. "I don't even like Transformers."

"I know something you  _do_  like," Leo suggested, waggling his eyebrows provocatively, and when that did make her laugh he pressed a light kiss to her lips. It was only a momentary touch, chaste and quick—his hair didn't even catch on fire—but it made her stomach drop. They were parting ways,  _really_  parting this time, and who knew when she would see him in person again?

Apparently he was thinking the same thing. " _Mierda_ ," he swore under his breath. "We live on opposite sides of the country. Like, literally, as opposite as you can get on the continental US."

She sighed. "I got that, thanks."

Festus clicked above them, ending with an emphatic  _AYY-NAH_ , and Leo looked up and interpreted with a rueful smile. "He's glad to go back to good weather, but he wants to take you with us. Man, what is it with my machines all liking you?"

"I'm personally offended. I'm told I have quite a way with mechanically-minded things." The corners of her lips turned up in a smirk.

He grinned. "Ha, okay, I'll give you that one."

But both their smiles slipped when something heavy banged from the  _Argo II_ 's quarterdeck and someone (Percy?) shouted for Leo to come look at it. He swore benignly in Spanish, but they both knew he had to go.

"You better keep in touch," she warned him, a threat in her tone. "Or I'll set the dogs on you."

He pretended to fall backward in terror. "Oh, no, swear you won't. They might . . .  _lick_  me to death!"

Sadness in her smile, she smacked him lightly on the shoulder. "Go fix your ship, repair boy."

He retreated one step, not looking away from her; then he leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. "See you later,  _querida_. Don't dance with anyone else while I'm gone, okay?"

And then he was gone, bounding up into his warship. Reyna backed up into the crowd, crossing her arms and gripping her forearms so tightly her nails dug in, because that way she wouldn't look like she wanted to cry.

 _We'll meet again_ , she told herself, but as the Greeks finished boarding and the  _Argo II_  rose into the sky, she had a hard time believing it.

* * *

"I heard about your tender goodbye." Octavian stood by the door to Reyna's office, grumpy as always. He was trying to rile her up, but really, once you've been demoted and discharged, you don't have a ton of standing to work from.

She set aside the form she'd just finished and, without looking over at him, said, "Well, that's nice for you. Are you ready to go?"

Something thudded behind her; at a guess, it sounded like a shoe on a suitcase. "Yes."

"Good." As praetor she got the dubious pleasure of being the last one to see the ex-augur before he left, mostly because no one else wanted to. Straightening her desktop, she stood and turned. He wore a plain purple T-shirt and khaki dress pants, an unusual look for him, but the rest of the world generally looked twice at a teenager in a toga. "Let's go," she said, leaving no room for argument. She swept out the office door, and he followed sullenly behind her, trailing his wheeled suitcase by the handle.

The praetors' offices were the part of camp closest to the exit, so at least it was a short trip. Most of her Romans had the sense to stay inside, to not get involved, but some were out and about under the pretense of sunbathing or swordfighting, and she didn't miss that she and Octavian had all eyes on them. The guards on duty at the Caldecott Tunnel saluted Reyna but ignored the ex-augur, visibly nettling him.

Reyna turned to Octavian, her head held high. "As a dishonorably discharged member of the legion, you are not welcome in Rome. As of now you are expelled from Camp Jupiter and forbidden to return. If you do attempt to reenter, the legion will use all force we deem necessary to keep you out." She left that open as to exactly how much force that might be; they both knew no one was particularly fond of him.

"Great, thanks," he said sarcastically.

"You are strongly advised to take this—" She pulled a vial of green powder out of her toga and handed it to him. "—mixed in a drink to erase your memories of demigod life. It will help keep monster trouble at bay."

He took the vial, and the way he was looking at it, she thought he might actually take the advice. To be honest, she wasn't sure whether or not she hoped he would. Even for a legacy, life outside of a camp was dangerous, exponentially more so if you actually knew about your godly heritage. If he did choose to keep his memories, there was a good chance monsters would get him within the next week.

"Do you understand these conditions?" she asked.

"Yes," he said, pocketing the vial as proudly as he could in such a situation. By all rights he should have addressed her as "praetor," but she let the disrespect go. She had won.

"Good." Reyna held up one hand and pointed into the Tunnel with two fingers. "Leave Rome, civilian."

Octavian and his wheely suitcase turned and skulked into the shadows, followed by one of the guards to make sure he got where he was going. Reyna tried not to feel pleased, but that was a lost cause.

* * *

Rain poured outside, but Reyna had left her villa door and windows open so she could hear and smell it. It was a Sunday afternoon, nothing to do, and with the rain she didn't want to take the dogs out, so she stayed in with them. For the moment she was in the kitchen, sticky-fingered and halfway through mixing a batch of chocolate-chip cookie dough, but she'd gotten distracted.

"What did the first president say when his soldier sassed him? 'I'm George Washing-DONE with your attitude!'"

Reyna flipped all the cabinet doors open, looking for the source of the noise. It sounded like a slightly muffled Leo, and the dogs were going crazy—barking and jumping around and wagging their whole bodies—but she couldn't find whatever it was.

"I'm glad I know sign language. It comes in pretty handy!"

Oh, gods. Was this like a ringtone? With the rushing of rain from outside, she was having trouble pinpointing where this sound came from.

"The other day my neighbor spilled his Scrabble set on the road outside my house. I went to see if everything was okay so I asked, 'Hey, what's the word on the street?'"

" _Leo!_ " she exclaimed, exasperated, but luckily for her sanity Aurum started pawing under the couch, and when she shoved the furniture aside she found a little machine thing, no bigger than a notebook cover, with different silly pictures of Leo flashing across the screen. At a loss, she took her best guess and pressed the button at the top. Good choice, even though she got flour on it. The slideshow dissolved into a live feed of her favorite repair boy.

" _Buenos días, mi reina_ ," he sang with a grin. "I'm a little disappointed it took you so long to find this."

"You hid it under the couch," she said in disbelief.

His mouth made an O as he scratched his head. "Oh. No, I left it on the counter. I don't know how it got under there."

Argentum barked like he was pleased with himself, his tongue lolling happily out of his mouth. Reyna glared at the dog without any malice. "Well, now that we've solved  _that_  mystery, how are you?"

"Eh, pretty good.  _Busy_. You?"

"Same." Gingerly picking up the device with two fingers, she took it into the kitchen and set it up on the counter so she could see and talk to him while she finished up with the cookies. "What is this thing, anyway?"

He grinned. "I call it ALC, as in All Leo's Coolness."

"Right." She smiled and shook her head as she cracked two eggs into the dough. An extra-strong breeze swept through the villa door, smelling clean and rainy. "And am I going to have to listen to the same five puns every time you call?"

Leo clapped his hand to his heart like he was wounded. "I'm offended that you think so little of my punny creativity. I guess I'll just have to call you a lot so you can find out."

And he did call her a lot, though maybe not as often as either of them would have liked, given both their responsibilities. Many times he would be working in Bunker Nine and she in her office, and they didn't constantly converse so much as just keep the video on so that they were  _almost_  together, and they could talk if they wanted to. Sometimes Reyna found herself bored in the middle of a big stack of forms and would just watch Leo tinker with whatever his current project was. It didn't matter that she had no idea what he was doing; he obviously knew and enjoyed it, and that in itself was interesting enough to merit attention.

It was one of these times—afternoon for her, evening for him—that she looked over and found him watching  _her_  for once, looking pensive (another oddity).

"What?" she asked, brushing her hand over her face in case something had somehow gotten on her.

He shook himself just a little and sat up. "Sorry,  _querida_ , nothing. What do you do when you're not working?"

"I—" She had to stop and think. Gods, her life was boring. "I exercise, take care of the dogs. Watch any crap movies Hylla sends me. Jason and I had lunch together the other day."

"But mostly you work," Leo said.

"Yeah. You're one to talk!"

"I'll have you know I left the bunker twice this week," he joked.

"To shower, I hope. I can practically smell your sweat from here."

"Hey!"

* * *

In the autumn Reyna liked to take the ALC out to the Garden of Bacchus, just to sit and talk and enjoy the weather and nature. That was her favorite pastime, even more than working, because somehow everything just seemed less heavy when she was talking to Leo. But as usual, the fall turned much too quickly into winter.

Winters never seemed to be quite as mild at Camp Jupiter as they were in the rest of California; Reyna, given her strong opposition to cold, was fairly certain it was a plot by the gods to get vengeance for every forgotten offering ever. At night it could get down to the twenties, and the days weren't much better—just windier. She stayed inside as much as she could, bundled up when she had to go out, and kept an eye on Aurum and Argentum to make sure they stayed tuned-up. The one time they didn't, the Vulcan kids had to do the repairs, and, well . . . it didn't turn out so well. A brash guy from the Third Cohort got his forearm chomped down on and had to go to the infirmary, and Aurum  _still_  couldn't bend his front legs. Winter. Ugh.

Reyna was just in from a Senate meeting, wrapped up in purple-and-gold scarves and hat and gloves and basically any winter wear she could get her hands on, nursing a big hot chocolate and a heavy weight on her shoulders. Even the dogs knew not to try to knock her over as she walked in the door. It had been a long meeting, even though they hadn't had anything truly serious to talk about in half a year, and she spent the entire time fighting a niggling feeling that they really didn't need her there. Of course, she was more than happy to blame her mood on the weather. Since it was way too cold to hang out in the Garden of Bacchus, she had fully planned on an afternoon with  _Treasure Planet_ , but when the ALC called out, "What do you call a psychic midget who escaped from jail? A small medium at large," she reluctantly paused Captain Amelia's excellence and answered the call.

"Morning, sunshine," Leo chirped, grinning and waving.

The dogs started to bark and wag their tails at the sound of his voice; she shushed them and narrowed her eyes. "If the sun is shining, I missed it."

"Ooh. Ouch." He toned down his happy face. "Well, happy day to you too. You not feeling so hot?"

"It's cold," she snapped. Granted, it was probably significantly colder where he was, but she wasn't there. She was here. And she was still cold.

"Winter'll do that."

"Gods, Leo. How's your work going? That thing you were fixing the other day?" A forced change of subject. She felt bad for taking her sour mood out on him.

He accepted the new topic without comment. "It's looking good. Buford is getting annoying, though, he hardly does anything I tell him these days. I'm going to replace him soon." He raised his voice for the last part, and in the background she could see the little table peeking around the corner. But she barely cracked a smile, and he noticed. "Hey, you okay, queen-face? You seem a little down."

Reyna rubbed her mouth and looked away. "Sorry. I'm fine, I just . . . I hate winter, and the Senate was a little trying today."

"Aw." He frowned and began to look around his shop like he might have a solution lying on a table somewhere. "What happened in the Senate? Can you tell me, or—?"

"Yeah, it's fine, nothing sensitive. The Vulcan kids are trying to get supplies together to make a flying ship not unlike yours, which so far is going pretty poorly. And even though we have Ella around most of the time, we're still out an augur, and a lot of people are getting fidgety to find another." Sighing, she took a long drink from her hot chocolate, which was now bordering on being merely lukewarm, and she didn't say much of what she wanted to, because that would mean acknowledging the thoughts existed.

 _Being praetor is weighing on me,_  she wanted to say.  _I don't enjoy it as much anymore, and I don't feel needed. There are others growing up that I could see taking my place and doing a good, solid job. Sometimes I think about retiring. Is that bad?_

Leo read the conflicting feelings in her expression, and though he didn't ask her to name them, he reached toward the video screen like he wanted to touch her, reassure her. "You've got this," he said warmly. "Whatever it is, you're good.  _No te preocupes_."

"Thanks," she sighed, and even though the problem still loomed, she felt a little better knowing someone believed she could solve it.

* * *

Thank the gods, winter eventually passed into spring, and as summer rolled in, hot and heavy, Reyna's praetorship problem still lurked, but one benefit of sticking around was that she received a message from Chiron, suggesting they bring the camps together again. It had been almost a year now since the two-week celebration (an insanely long year, if she were honest), and both Greek and Roman campers were expressing wishes to see each other again. She didn't have to spend more than a few minutes of thought on the proposal before she replied with an enthusiastic  _yes_.

So now, in the pleasant heat of early June, half of New Rome sat again in the shadow of the  _Argo II_ , and Greek demigods were rushing back into the forum to collide with their Roman friends, the crowds mingling and merging until the oranges and purples seemed to blend. Out of her armor, Reyna waited by the edge of the masses, searching the Greek faces for one in particular. Percy waved at her, as did Annabeth at his side (was something glinting on her finger?), but she didn't see Leo.

"Queen-face!" Familiar arms wrapped around her; she squirmed anyway, just for the sake of being stubborn. She craned her neck to look back at him, and when she saw his face, an overwhelming sense of relief flooded through her. Leo was here.

"I warned you about attacking me from behind," she said, only able to suppress her smile into a smirk, and though he did let her go, he grinned back at her. She suddenly realized she had to tilt her head up a little to look at him—had he grown taller?

"And I didn't listen then either. Here, come say hi to Festus, or he's gonna go on strike." He tugged her around the crowds so the two of them could shout hellos up to the bronze dragon head, who did indeed seem a little less apt to flame after seeing her. Reyna had to hold her hand over her eyes to keep the sun and the gleaming bronze from blinding her.

"You want to get out of the sun?" she asked the son of Hephaestus, jerking her thumb toward the Principia, raising her voice so he could hear her over the crowds. He looked somewhat surprised but nodded agreeably enough, so they extricated themselves from the mass chaos (no way that would disperse in less than half an hour).

"Going somewhere?" called Jason as they passed.

"I've got a meeting." She didn't stop to discuss it; her head was pounding in her eagerness to have a moment alone with her male counterpart.

The praetors' villas were in the far corner of the Principia, of course, so it did take a few minutes to reach hers. She unlocked the door and held it open, pretending to sweep him a bow as she held the door open, and he strolled inside with an exaggerated swagger.

"Coffee time?" he asked, but as soon as the door was closed Reyna all but yanked Leo into her, throwing her arms around his neck, smashing her lips onto his, scrunching up her face, getting as close to him as she could without doing something that actually  _would_  cause a scandal, Octavian or no. He certainly wasn't pushing her away; embers crackled by her ear as one of his hands gripped the back of her head, the other the small of her back. She could have sworn she felt literal sparks tingling against her mouth. The familiar smell of oil and sweat and metal filled her nose. She had missed him.

Eventually Leo drew back, a dazed grin on his face. Gods, those dimples, those  _eyes_. "I missed you too,  _reina_."

Catching her breath, a flushed and slightly embarrassed Reyna smoothed her hair back and took a step toward the kitchen. "You want anything? I have ice cream and cocoa and coffee." The last was a special purchase, made in preparation for this visit, since she still didn't like it much herself. She hoped he wouldn't call her out on it.

Understanding glinted in his eye, but he didn't say anything. He would probably bring it up later, at the most inopportune time. For now he only nodded, with a bright "Coffee!" so she pulled out two mugs and the ingredients for both cocoa and coffee. When the hot beverages of deliciousness were ready, she brought them over to him, and the two of them took their seats on either end of her couch, like no time had passed. The dogs immediately hung their heads on his stomach and gave the biggest automaton-puppy eyes she had ever seen.

"How are things here?" Leo asked, blinking quickly as he absorbed the caffeine. It occurred to Reyna that he had probably been up for a full day, maybe even without the aid of coffee. No, never mind, he'd probably been sure to stock up before the trip.

"Pretty good, I guess," she said with a shrug. "Everyone's getting along fine, and there's a son of Apollo—an actual son, not a legacy—we're planning to name as augur. We tested him out, and he looks good for it."

"Great!" He gave her a big thumbs-up. "One less thing to worry about."

Half-laughing, she muttered dryly, "I wish, right?"

Leo drank some more from his coffee, but his eyes never left her, dark and pensive. "What else is bothering you?" he asked, equal parts curious and concerned. He didn't even try to make a joke—did she look that bad?

Reyna stared at her hands. Part of her wanted to keep the burden to herself, but part of her had been holding onto it alone for too long, and just for being asked about, it spilled out of her like overflowing hot chocolate: "I don't know what I'm  _doing_  anymore, I always thought I'd just be praetor forever, I guess, but now it doesn't really feel right, it doesn't seem like they need me and I don't know, college might be interesting, but, oh gods—what will I _do?_ " Embarrassed, she exhaled shortly, shakily, and looked up at him.

He thought on it. "I don't know," he said finally, sounding disappointed in himself. "I'd say if you don't want to be praetor anymore, then resign. It's not worth making yourself miserable. And if you want to go to college, go for it. I think Percy said you have one here?"

"We do, yes."

"So yeah, why not?"

She rolled her shoulders in something like a shrug. It still didn't seem quite . . . there yet. The plans weren't fully formed; something was missing, some piece of logic or stepping stone.

Something clinked in the underside of the couch, making Leo jump and begin to look around him. "That was probably just the dogs," Reyna said, but he kept searching. "You lose something?"

"I've lost my heart, but I'm pretty sure you have it," he joked, but he stammered, and the tips of his curls started to burn.

She latched onto the cheesy line. A little bit of levity was more than welcome right now. "I seem to have lost my phone number, can I have yours?" she offered.

He laughed nervously, still peeking between the cushions. "I could use a map. I'm getting lost in your eyes."

"Um . . . I can't think of any other lost ones. Is your name 'swiffer'? You just swept me off my feet." She took a sip from her mug.

"I must be a snowflake, because I've fallen for you." He must have found whatever it was: his eyes lit up and he crammed his hand down into the recesses of the couch to grab it. When he retrieved it, though, he seemed more anxious.

"What time do you have to be back in heaven?" she asked.

"Are you taking applications for a fiancé?"

Reyna choked on her hot chocolate.

Hair very much in flames, Leo immediately turned an impressive shade of red, but he held out the clinky thing that had fallen into the couch: a flawless gold ring that he very likely had made himself. No diamond, but then, she had never been big on rocks. In that moment, they left the pickup lines behind. "I mean, you don't know what you're doing and I don't know what I'm doing, but, y'know, what if we figured it out together for, like . . . ever?"

She coughed, trying to breathe properly. "Gods damn it, Leo. Are you serious?"

"I . . . was, yeah."

"Good." And she set aside her mug, scooted in to the middle of the couch, and kissed him firmly on the mouth, her hands on either side of his lava-hot face.

Leaning just an inch away, his voice cracking in anxiety, he asked, "Is that a yes?"

Reyna smiled incredulously. " _Yes_ , it's a yes, camp-bomber."

"Holy Hephaestus,  _mi reina_." He looked amazed, flabbergasted, like he'd expected to be turned down and kicked out the door, so just to be difficult she kissed him again.

"You gonna give me the ring, or do I just have to guess what it looks like on me?"

Grinning, laughing in gleeful disbelief, he took her hand and slid the ring on. She almost missed that it expanded to fit her finger. Awesome.

"I can come here, if you want," Leo said, talking quickly in case she changed her mind. "You're more attached to Camp Jupiter than I am to Camp Half-Blood, I think, so I'd be okay with moving, but we'd have to figure out what to do with the bunker and stuff—"

Reyna leaned back onto her side of the couch, smiling as she let him run his mouth. They would figure out a plan, and then she could spend the rest of her life meeting Leo.


End file.
